OVERLAND PARK, Kan. -- U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall's audience of about 40 people packed a banquet room in a Kansas City-area bistro. No one wore a mask during his lunchtime remarks about the coronavirus. The Republican nominee for Kansas' open Senate seat put one on later while talking to masked reporters but dropped it for a moment, saying, "I can't breathe."
A few days earlier, Democrat Barbara Bollier invited half a dozen local officials and activists to her first in-person event of the fall campaign. They stood in a socially distanced circle outside an elementary school empty of students in Manhattan in northeast Kansas.
In the polar-opposite approaches to campaigning, awkwardness often seems the only common ground. Marshall and Bollier, however, have another shared experience: medical school.
At another time in U.S. history, that might have meant the two doctors would be closely aligned on how best to prevent the spread of disease. But in this one, it only highlights how partisanship is shaping campaigns' messages on public health.
Across the country, many Democrats are largely abiding by health officials' guidance. Some Republicans are choosing to forego that caution because they view the guidelines as a personal freedom of choice rather than a mandate.
In accepting the GOP's renomination Thursday, President Donald Trump defied his own administration's pandemic guidelines to speak for more than an hour to a tightly packed, largely maskless crowd.
In North Carolina, the Republican candidate for governor, Dan Forest, has held so many big, indoor rallies and insisted on shaking hands so often that incumbent Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, put out a television ad featuring a doctor imploring Forest to "please stop."
The split extended to voting in Kansas' primary earlier in August. Roughly two-thirds of Republicans voted in-person, while roughly two-thirds of Democrats used mail-in ballots.
Bollier has Democrats hoping they can win a Kansas Senate seat for the first time since 1932. The retired anesthesiologist is a state legislator and former Republican, who left the party in 2018, saying it no longer represented her values, partly because of Trump.
She's run a largely virtual campaign, a caution she says is guided by both her background and personal experience. A friend was infected this spring and nearly died, she says.
"I cannot understand why a virus is being politicized," she said during a recent interview. "It is public health, period."
But Marshall, an obstetrician who gave up his medical practice for Congress and has aligned himself closely with Trump, doesn't see the issue as so settled. He says he's taking an anti-malaria drug to prevent infection, even as regulators warn the risks could outweigh the benefits in some people.
Marshall doesn't argue against the effectiveness of masks and says he "respects" the virus. But he acknowledges sometimes his decisions are a response to cultural and political factors.
"I tell you what, if I walk into rural Kansas with a mask on, people look at me like I've got three eyes or something, right?" Marshall said after his recent indoor Kansas City-area speech.
Information for this article was contributed by Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press.
