When the Kansas legislature took up a bill in early 2026 that would strip transgender residents’ driver’s licenses and bar them from government bathrooms, Bobby Joe Robertson Jr., a financial analyst at a petroleum refinery in the small town of McPherson, about an hour north of Wichita, decided to write her state representative a letter.

“Technically, I wrote three,” Robertson says. There was the original letter, asking her legislator if he’d be up to meet with her, a trans woman, to discuss the painful effects the law would have on her family. And then a follow-up asking the legislator if he could please respond. “The third one,” she recalls, “was me telling him that I’m going to take his job.”

It will be an uphill battle. President Donald Trump carried McPherson by a more than two-to-one margin in 2024, as Robertson’s current Republican state representative was running unopposed in HD-73. A different Republican legislator had run unopposed in 2022. And 2020. And 2018. But this year, the incumbent has chosen not to seek re-election—and Robertson has been knocking doors after work for months, organizing her neighbors, and raising money for the race ahead. “I don’t think it’ll be a landslide or anything,” she said. “But I think I have the potential.”

“The power that is built in November in our state capitals…is going to have a national impact.”

Robertson is one of 18 Kansas Democrats contesting a state house seat this fall that went unopposed in the last election. Some of these districts have gone years without even token Democratic opposition—two will feature their........

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