Nancy Kassebaum Baker, former US senator from Kansas, dies aged 94

Kassebaum Baker became the first woman elected to the US Senate without following a spouse into office

Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas governor’s daughter who became the first woman elected to the US Senate without following a spouse into office, has died. She was 94.

Kassebaum Baker died on Friday of natural causes, according to her son, Bill Kassebaum.

“She loved Kansas. She loved people from Kansas and representing Kansas for 18 years in the US Senate ,” he told the Associated Press. “She was an independent-minded Republican who was willing to stand up for what she thought was right, even if that meant going against the party.”

She was elected to the US Senate in 1978 and served three terms. Her modest demeanor endeared her to voters of all political stripes, though she shared the progressive Republican politics of her father, Kansas governor Alf Landon, the unsuccessful 1936 Republican nominee for president. Even after leaving the Senate early in 1997, she continued taking on public service roles.

She married the former US senator Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, in 1996. He died in 2014.

Kassebaum Baker remained an icon for Kansans generally. She could work with Senate colleagues of all political philosophies, and a 1996 health insurance law bore her name, along with that of liberal US senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Her election to the Senate brought her immediate national attention. When she announced her retirement, she was among eight senators who were women and the only one to chair a Senate committee, the labor and human resources panel.

She was also in a dwindling bloc of moderate-to-liberal Republicans, having supported, for example, a ban on assault weapons championed by Democratic president Bill Clinton.

Yet she never polarized Kansas conservatives as other GOP moderates did. She connected with voters because she never seemed caught up in the trappings of power, and when she retired, she acknowledged: “I’d rather cuddle up and do needlepoint all day.”

Kassebaum Baker broke with the Republican party as it became more conservative later in her life, endorsing Democratic candidates for Kansas governor and US senator, including Democratic governor Laura Kelly, who was elected in 2018 and re-elected in 2022. Kelly’s 2022 Republican opponent, then state attorney general Derek Schmidt, had worked on Kassebaum Baker’s Senate staff.

She also declared in 2021 that Donald Trump should be impeached after supporters attacked the US Capitol toward the end of his first presidency hoping to stop congressional certification of his defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 White House election.

“This just has gone too far,” she told Kansas City’s KMBC news station.