Kansas GOP waits to see whether plumber's Senate bid surges

MANHATTAN, Kan. (AP) — The founder of a Kansas City-area plumbing company who is running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Kansas acknowledged Saturday that he would love to have a highly coveted seat on the Senate Agriculture Committee but doesn't know how he'd go about getting it.

The question to Bob Hamilton and four other Republicans during a debate was a natural one, given the importance of farm policy to Kansas and the fact that retiring GOP Sen. Pat Roberts has served as chairman of both the Senate and House agriculture committees.

“I am an outsider, and you’ve just got to show me how to do that,” said Hamilton, who was participating in his first debate in Manhattan, home to the Kansas Farm Bureau’s headquarters and the state’s only agriculture college at Kansas State University.

Republicans both in Kansas and Washington are watching to see whether the 60-year-old Hamilton's late-entry candidacy takes off in what had seemed increasingly like a two-person primary race between U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall of western Kansas and former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, nationally known for advocating tough immigration policies.

Hamilton opened by saying that Republicans watching the livestream of the audience-less event didn't know much about him, though he's been running television ads for weeks. He sometimes seemed to search for words and phrases and focused on broad themes as other candidates touched on policy specifics.

“Finding the words and that kind of thing, you know, I’ll get better at that, and I don’t ever want to be a professional politician,” he said after the debate. “I want to be the guy who will help fix problems.”

Hamilton was able to match Marshall's $2 million-plus in fundraising by the end of March with his own money. The possibility that he could self-fund a campaign...