The Oppo Mastermind Who Could Take Down Roger Marshall

Early in September, a New York Times investigation rocked the Kansas Senate race. The incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, the paper revealed, had sued some 700 patients over his previous, decadeslong career as an obstetrician-gynecologist in rural Kansas; in 81 of the cases, patients had gotten arrested over missed court dates. In an agricultural state already hard-hit by Donald Trump’s tariffs, and in a cycle with affordability as voters’ top issue, the revelation of struggling patients facing legal peril over medical debt — in one case of as little as $101 — changed the map, putting Republicans officially on the defensive in a state that had looked safe only months before.

The story was a coup for the paper and veteran health care reporter Sarah Kliff who, as the paper noted, “reviewed thousands of court records and interviewed eight people whom Roger Marshall sued over medical debt.” But many also suspected a particular hand behind the initial tip: Tyson Brody, a 39-year-old opposition researcher and an alum of both the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders campaigns, who moved home to Kansas to work for Marshall’s Democratic challenger, Rev. Adam Hamilton. Brody is “the kind of guy who, forget a skeleton in your closet — he will find every single dust bunny in your closet,” said Caitlin Legacki, a senior fellow at Third Way and a Democratic strategist who has worked with Brody in the past.

The Times declined to comment, as did both Brody and the Hamilton campaign. Kliff has said on Kansas City public radio that she will not reveal who gave her the tip, as is standard journalistic practice. But journalists and operatives familiar with Brody’s work think it’s no coincidence that the Hamilton campaign’s oppo game is exploding as it happens to employ one of the Democratic party’s top practitioners of the craft — in his own home state.

Marshall has said he treated every patient regardless of ability to pay. But in the weeks since the story ran, polls have tightened, prognosticators have moved the race toward Democrats (the Cook Political report now rates it a toss-up) and millions of dollars have rushed into what suddenly looks like a battleground on the prairie — in a state so associated with conservativism that Democrats use the book title What’s the Matter With Kansas? as shorthand for benighted farmers voting against what liberals see as their own interests. Giddy Democrats and despondent Republicans alike are contemplating the possibility that Kansas could send a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1932. And central to that phenomenon — along with a damaged incumbent and a unique challenger — is the old-fashioned, dark art of oppo research.

The dynamics are all the more noteworthy in a fractured media environment where it’s rare for any given story to break through the cacophony of legacy media, newer outlets, online influencers and the attention-sucking machine that is the Donald Trump presidency. But the frenzied competition of the race’s waning days suggests the remaining power of a resonant, records-driven revelation paired with the imprimatur of The New York Times. “It’s a little bit old school,” said Joe Rodota, a former researcher who praised Brody recently on his own Substack, Oppo File. With the caveat that “of course we’ll never know” the origin of the Times story, he said, “I think prior generations of oppo researchers read this story and nod approvingly.”

Which is not to say a Hamilton victory is assured — Kansas has broken Democratic hearts before, including in Marshall’s first Senate campaign in 2020. Then, too, the race featured tightening polls, a moderate, seemingly Kansas-friendly Democratic candidate, and millions rushing into the state in a year expected to be tough for Republicans. In the end, Marshall prevailed by double digits. “We’ve seen this play out before in Kansas,” said Danedri Herbert, who chairs the Kansas GOP.

Still, said Ashley All, a longtime Kansas Democratic operative, “I think it feels different” in 2026. In 2020, for instance, no one had surfaced Marshall’s lawsuits, which were not as easily accessible online at the time. All said that for Democrats to win in the state, they need to run a perfect campaign featuring a near-perfect candidate against a terrible opponent, in a perfect political environment — and then they also need to get lucky. This year, she sees all of those factors — and a strategist who knows how to take advantage of them. “Tyson is obviously operating at a very high level,” she said.

That includes shunning media attention on him personally: He has previously dinged another operative for making himself the story while his candidate was actively campaigning. “I feel like talking about Tyson is itself almost verboten,” said a national Democratic operative who has worked with Brody, granted anonymity to discuss the verboten subject. “He operates in the shadows, which is how most oppo people do.” On the other hand, Brody is all over Twitter pumping out stories likely informed by his own research with strings of incredulous punctuation a la “?????” or “!!!”

Marshall’s campaign, too, is quick to post negative stories about Hamilton — and peddles oppo of its own. “If POLITICO is writing about opposition research in this race, the story is what Kansans have learned about Adam Hamilton in the last three weeks,” wrote Alex DeGrasse, an advisor to Kansans for Marshall, in a statement that included 10 links to stories in conservative outlets. Among them was reporting on a sermon in which Hamilton discussed the benefits of being educated, white and male and said he had to “repent” for his resulting indifference to others’ suffering; that he had donated to and voted for Kamala Harris before asking her not to campaign for him; and that he has made millions off of tech stocks but now calls for slowing down AI development.

DeGrasse also highlighted Hamilton’s recent comments to CNN regarding allegations surfaced by a primary rival that were investigated by local media earlier this year. Hamilton said he wished he’d called the police immediately when allegations of child sexual abuse surfaced at a camp run by his church in 2005 — the victims could not positively identify the perpetrator in the church’s internal investigation, and law enforcement’s investigation was likewise inconclusive when they were notified the next year, according to documents reviewed by the Kansas Reflector. “Kansans can judge for themselves which campaign is running on research and which one is running from it,” DeGrasse wrote.

But GOP operatives have complained to POLITICO that Marshall’s lackluster performance in the race is now costing their party millions to try to save the seat. (Brody duly tweeted out this detail with an “o rly?”) More recently, Marshall has expanded his team with seasoned operatives.

“The oppo has been the kind of stuff that campaign people dream about,” said Legacki. She acknowledged that Brody gets a lot of attention by virtue of being so online. But she also noted that the structure of Hamilton’s campaign allows Brody to function as an attack dog in a way that preserves the candidate’s gentler image as the senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas. “It’s hard to do that,” she said, “when you’re taking a Midwestern preacher and having him rip a guy’s throat out.”

Brody grew up in Johnson County, Kansas; his father founded the local alt-weekly, The Pitch, in the late 1980s. Brody fils went coastal for college at Columbia, and since then has spent much of his career as a political operative, according to his Substack, which he named “Ragpicker,” after the oppo researcher’s practice of “picking through the refuse of the news cycle.” There, he defines “oppo” as “simply the act of examining a subject’s political, professional, and personal lives, and seeing where the friction lies.”

Ragpicker was active only for a few months in 2025, however; as he wrote, discretion was paramount on campaigns, and by mid-2026 he was back home working for Hamilton — the latest in a line of clients that included Barack Obama in 2012, Clinton in 2016 and Sanders in 2020.This last assignment made minor news, because he’d previously helped assemble the Bernie oppo book on behalf of the Clinton campaign. “One of the reasons we hired Tyson is to prepare this campaign for whatever false accusations and allegations are leveled against us,” Faiz Shakir, then Sanders’ campaign manager, told New York Magazine at the time. (Shakir did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

Before his Substack went quiet, Brody detailed some of his basic approach, which involved obsessing over documents, carpet bombing public institutions with records requests and pitching the results to reporters, who, he wrote, were often uninterested. He described one such quest in 2014, when he served as research director on the ultimately losing campaign of then-Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu: “There’s nothing as satisfying as finding something someone tried to hide, building a case brick by brick, and finally forcing it into the open. ... Ultimately the best oppo isn’t the fanciest detective work. It’s finding the words that let the voters say what they want to think.”

One of the things that distinguishes good oppo from merely OK oppo is persistence, said Rodota. He noted that Brody, via his Twitter feed, was prepared to shoot down the inevitable pushback and denials from the opposing campaign about the medical debt story. For instance, when Marshall’s campaign denied responsibility for charging patients 18% interest on their debt, Brody posted billing statements from Marshall’s own office detailing the interest rate. Seeing that, Rodota thought, “There’s somebody who has organized the material and is waiting for a rebuttal and is prepared.”

Throughout the fall, Marshall has faced a steady drip of damaging revelations, to the point that the campaign has launched a section of its webpage devoted to rebutting them. There was the Kansas Reflector and MSNOW story, based on documents the outlets “obtained” and linking to a Brody tweet in the very first sentence, raising questions about whether Marshall’s office was blurring the line between official and campaign spending. (The Marshall campaign’s site says the senator is fully compliant with FEC rules and has a campaign team separate from his official staff.) A few days later came an AP story describing an ultimately unsuccessful earmark Marshall requested that could boost the value of the senator’s own property. (A campaign spokesperson told the outlet the project would have benefited a wildlife refuge and not the property.) In between, there was the Facebook post Brody surfaced from the owner of a local bakery, who posted a $678.75 unpaid invoice from supplying baked goods to Marshall’s 2020 campaign — an episode Brody dubbed “#cookiegate” that eventually wound its way into The New York Times. (Marshall paid almost double the invoice after the bill became public, though not, as Brody pointed out, with 18% interest.) “It’s just kind of this ongoing, never-ending saga that has plagued Roger Marshall from the end of the primary on,” said All, the Democratic operative.

In the meantime, national Republicans have taken note to the extent that Trump himself descended on Kansas for a rally this week, where he defended Marshall by musing aloud that his critics were “making him look like a Shylock type guy” for attempting to collect his medical debts.

Brody gleefully tweeted the clip.