In seven primary and general elections for Congress, Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall has never won by less than 11 percentage points.

He is now essentially tied in the polls with Democrat Adam Hamilton. And, facing the fight of his political life, Marshall is showing the limits of a campaigner who has rarely had to answer sustained, difficult questions — a problem also plaguing Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton, who has experience surviving a Republican primary but is struggling in a competitive general election race against Democrat James Talarico.

In September, a New York Times investigation found that Marshall’s medical practice sued more than 700 patients for unpaid bills. More than 80 were arrested after missing court dates. The Hamilton campaign responded quickly, producing an ad featuring a woman who said she was arrested while eight months pregnant over a missed payment.

A seasoned candidate would have been prepared for this moment. Campaigns typically conduct their own opposition research, looking for vulnerabilities and strategizing on how to address them. Marshall’s team could have released documents clarifying his role in collection decisions or found former patients to speak to the care they received. And he could have had a practiced answer that acknowledged that it was a bad look, expressed empathy and pivoted to the difficulties of running a rural practice.

Marshall did not do that.

On Sept. 8, when the Times investigation first appeared, a campaign spokesperson attacked the newspaper for treating “a rural doctor keeping the hospital’s lights on” as a scandal. Four days later, at their first debate, Marshall called the collection practices “common, common business practices,” said he was not involved with collections and argued the issue was “just noise.” The answer drew chants of “Shame on you” from the crowd.

Then, on Sept. 28, Marshall’s lawyers sent Hamilton a cease-and-desist letter calling the ad defamatory. Rather than letting the story fade, that generated another round of coverage.

If Marshall were a first-time candidate or the controversy were obscure, these missteps might be understandable. But he’s been in politics for a decade and made his OB-GYN practice central to his identity, campaigning as “Doc Marshall.” This was an entirely predictable vulnerability that could have come up in any of his previous races.

But Marshall has only run in relatively safe Republican areas. His former congressional district was safely Republican, giving him a margin of victory of roughly 40 points. While his 2020 Senate race was somewhat competitive, Kansas hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932.

It’s not that Marshall is unskilled at campaigning. It’s that running for a safe seat demands an entirely different kind of campaign.

Republican primary voters are already primed to distrust The New York Times — which probably would not have devoted the same resources to the story in the first place, as national political reporters typically focus on competitive races. In a closer district or state, the story might have emerged years earlier, giving Marshall the chance to address it — or forcing voters to decide whether they accepted his explanation — in an earlier campaign.

Paxton has a slightly different problem. He has already survived multiple scandals including a securities fraud case, a 2023 impeachment by the Republican-led state House, his wife filing for divorce on “biblical grounds” and even a claim that he pocketed a $1,000 pen. But his larger problem is that he has not built a general-election identity other than as a Republican who is loyal to Trump, but nonetheless mocked by the president.

In a year when those aren’t advantages, that has hurt his campaign.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that an incumbent from a safe seat will be rusty at campaigning. In heavily Republican Nebraska, Sen. Pete Ricketts is facing what could become the closest general election of his career against independent Dan Osborn. An independent group recently ran an ad criticizing Ricketts for supporting a pardon, as governor, for a man who was convicted of raping his ex-wife. He responded in a call by saying that as a husband and “father of two girls,” his “heart goes out” to the victim, called it a “terrible crime” and noted he was not pardoned until long after he served his 14-year sentence.

“I made the best decision I could at the time with the information I had,” he said.

Ricketts didn’t make the pardon controversy disappear. But he responded to it with sympathy, relevant facts and a measure of personal responsibility. Unlike Marshall, he didn’t make it worse.

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