A pair of Democrats from Lawrence with personal grievances about the Trump administration are challenging incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann for his 1st District seat.

Lauren Reinhold, a longtime federal employee at the Social Security Administration, was swept up in Elon Musk’s DOGE purge of federal employees. Colin McRoberts, a professor at the University of Kansas business school, was inspired to run for office after attending Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall’s contentious March 1 town hall in Oakley.

Both Reinhold and McRoberts believe they can overcome the long odds Democrats have faced in the district by taking aim at Mann’s willingness to support an unpopular Republican agenda.

“We were promised: ‘Things are going to be better for you.’ And I’m just one person, but they certainly were not better for me,” Reinhold said.

“I was lied to. I was told my prices would be lower,” she added. “I was told that things would be better for my kids. I was told they would fix health care. And it’s been a year, and none of that’s happened.”

McRoberts said his experience in business negotiations has showed him that representatives like Mann are unable to negotiate on behalf of their district because they are just “going to do what the party wants them to do.”

He said the One Big Beautiful Bill Act marked a tectonic shift by severing the ties between aid for farmers and food assistance for low-income people. Those programs traditionally have been bundled together as a compromise between urban and rural states.

“That’s really going to change the political balance of those subsidy payments going forward, which makes it a lot less stable,” McRoberts said. “And it’s the kind of short-term thinking that’s going to be really dangerous, because we don’t have negotiators in Congress.”

Thanks to state-level GOP gerrymandering in 2022, the liberal town of Lawrence in northeast Kansas is now included in the vast 1st District that covers much of the western two-thirds of the state, all the way to the Colorado border. Only one Democrat — Howard Miller, in 1952 — has won the seat in the 150 years since the district formed. Mann has won three terms, with about 70% of the vote each time.

Ready to fight back

Reinhold lived in Topeka until she was 6, then moved to St. Louis. She returned to Kansas in 1993 to attend law school at KU, and stayed to raise a family there.

“I want the world to know that I’m prepared to fight for Kansans, for everyday Americans,” Reinhold said. “I think we’ve been overlooked. We’re not getting what we need. The regular person is increasingly suffering economically. We’re all at risk of our health getting worse.”

She defined a “regular person” as “anyone who’s not fabulously wealthy,” or doesn’t have to worry about their current and future economic security.

Her life was upended after President Donald Trump took office and handed a billionaire tech mogul the power to fire government workers under the pretense of efficiency.

Reinhold said she received the email that was sent to federal employees in late January, urging them to quit their jobs in exchange for pay through September. At first, she resisted.

“And I thought, you know what, if they fire me, I could run for office,” she said. “I could run for Congress and try to fight this mess they’ve made of the federal government. Fight back and restore what the American people need.”

After weeks of turmoil, firings and reassignments, she agreed to take the buyout when a new offer was made in April. She is taking time off to focus solely on running for Congress.

“It’s not about me. It’s not about, oh, poor Lauren lost her job to DOGE,” Reinhold said. “That’s going to be part of the campaign, but I really care that the American people get the government they deserve, that we get the governmental services we need and deserve to make our lives better, and I feel so passionate about that.”

Embracing neighbors

McRoberts said he drove four and a half hours from Lawrence to Oakley because he wanted to hear what Marshall would say about Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and vaccines.

And, McRoberts said, it was pretty clear that Marshall didn’t want people to show up.

McRoberts ended up taking one of the videos that went viral from Marshall’s town hall. People booed Marshall when he dismissed their concerns about Trump administration policies, and the senator left abruptly.

“He didn’t have to care because he thinks he’s running in a safe election,” McRoberts said. “That affected me, the idea that he was so complacent that he’s just going to turn around and walk away, because it’s not fun to talk about the things he’s been doing wrong in Congress.”

McRoberts started thinking a run for Congress during the drive back to Lawrence. He figure he, or even his students at KU, could have handled questions better than Marshall. He wanted to challenge Marshall directly but realized a U.S. Senate campaign would require him to raise millions of dollars.

“I’m just not a wealthy man,” McRoberts said. “I cannot afford to leave my day job. I teach for a living because I have to pay the mortgage, and I love to teach.”

Marshall had complained that people from Lawrence were trying to disrupt his appearance in Oakley, even though both towns are in the same congressional district. The implicit message from Marshall, as McRoberts saw it, was that people from outside of western Kansas are not your friends.

Actually, McRoberts said, people across the district have a shared economic interest rooted in agriculture.

“I think that’s been going on for a long time, an intentional strategy to use the east against the west, and maybe to a lesser extent, the west against the east, to drive these wedges for the benefit of party politics,” McRoberts said. “And I will not and cannot play that game. We’re all neighbors. The 1st District is much more alike than it is different.”

A non-zero chance

Reinhold said her work experience gives her a deep understanding of how the federal government works, and that she is better suited than Mann to represent the district.

“I will listen to Kansans,” she said. “First of all, I will get out there and talk to Kansans and listen to them, and listen to what they need, and vote in Congress in accordance with that, and initiate bills, which he’s done very little of, to make our lives better.”

McRoberts said he believes Democrats have an opportunity to break through the Republican stronghold in the 1st District.

“Especially since we’ve seen the impact of tariffs, since we’ve seen the crisis of incompetence and corruption in the federal government, since we’ve seen Tracey Mann really fail to rise to the occasion,” he said.

“The odds are still very long, but it’s a long way from zero, and those odds are getting better every day,” he added.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

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