Just before the coronavirus upended daily life in March, Barbara Bollier was with Terry Rosell, a friend and Kansas City bioethicist. The two have known each other for more than a decade, but that day Bollier had the virus on her mind.

The likely Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Kansas insisted that they not shake hands, but he forgot as they were saying goodbye.

“That experience with Barbara, the look of alarm in her eyes when I was getting too close,” Rosell said. “I’ve thought about that over and over again.”

The pandemic has altered politics and campaigning across America, but perhaps no Kansas candidate has shifted course as sharply as Bollier. The 62-year-old state senator, a retired anesthesiologist, promises to be a “voice of reason” as Washington pursues an incoherent and chaotic response to a virus that has so far infected more than 23,000 Kansans and killed 307.

Bollier paused in-person events months ago, replacing rallies and meet-and-greets with a series of virtual town halls targeted at different areas of the state. She campaigns from her red brick home in the prosperous Mission Hills community of Johnson County, often perched on a large exercise ball as she joins Zoom calls.

Her staff works elsewhere and meetings are conducted by phone or video. Spokeswoman Alexandra De Luca said she hasn’t shaken Bollier’s hand since joining the campaign in February.

“There are still people on my team I have not physically met,” Bollier said.

Her self-imposed quarantine strikes a sharp contrast with her leading Republican rivals, who have started appearing in public again. And Bollier’s campaign rebuked Rep. Roger Marshall after the physician said he takes hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug touted by President Donald Trump that’s unproven as a treatment against COVID-19. Her campaign said promoting an unproven medicine is potentially dangerous.

“I knew we were in trouble and so I’ve been very vocal from the beginning how serious this is,” Bollier said.

Her husband, Rene, who practices at St. Joseph Family Medical Care in Kansas City, is on the front lines of the pandemic. It means that the two are essentially social distancing at home to limit the possibility he’ll accidentally infect her. Bollier said the separation been one of the toughest changes imposed by COVID-19.

It’s not the couple’s first close encounter with a brutal infectious disease. The two trained during the AIDS crisis, and Bollier completed her residency in Houston from 1984 to 1987. She recalled the anguish and isolation the men suffered because laws and regulations didn’t always allow non-kin by their side.

“Oh, God, it still makes my heart hurt because it was so hard to be caring for people,” Bollier said. “I know they just needed to be loved because they were going to die.”

Opportunism or conscience?

Bollier’s caution in navigating the pandemic is consistent with a deliberative approach to politics that Democrats hope will attract voters craving stability during difficult, unpredictable times. Although she has been a state lawmaker since 2010, she is a relatively new name to voters across much of Kansas.

She doesn’t possess Kris Kobach’s national notoriety or Roger Marshall’s Washington experience after two terms in the House. Before her decision in December 2018 to switch parties, Bollier was best known as arguably the most moderate Republican in the Kansas Senate.

In Topeka, she championed Medicaid expansion and firearms restrictions, frequently causing friction with GOP leaders. She repeatedly voted against abortion restrictions, bucking the vast majority of her Republican colleagues.

In 2018, Bollier watched as Kelly, her Senate colleague, handily vanquished Kobach in the gubernatorial race. Today, Bollier’s campaign features several of the same themes: moderation, fiscal responsibility and support for public education. While GOP candidates have attacked Kelly’s response to the pandemic, Bollier said she trusted her ally to help decide when schools should open. Bollier has also urged Kansans to wear masks, but other candidates have appeared without them.

The two also share a common benefactor: Former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a highly influential figure in Kansas Democratic politics, who endorsed Kelly in 2018 and Bollier last fall. The party quickly coalesced around Bollier following the announcement.

Patrick Miller, a political scientist at the University of Kansas, said that while Bollier shares much in common with Kelly as a candidate, a run for the Senate requires a different kind of campaign.

“A different set of issues, a lot more partisan,” Miller said of the Senate race, in contrast to the race for governor.

Bollier is waging what may be the most competitive Democratic campaign for U.S. Senate Kansas has seen in decades. If elected, she would be only the third woman from Kansas to ever serve in the Senate, after Nancy Kassebaum and Sheila Frahm. The state hasn’t sent a Democrat to fill one of its Senate seats since the 1930s.

She is powered by a fundraising juggernaut. Bollier collected $3.7 million between April and June, a quarterly record for the state. Since Bollier is the prohibitive favorite in the primary (her only opponent is retired court services officer Robert Tillman) she’s been able to build a large cash advantage ahead of the general election this fall and outpace her GOP rivals, who are locked in a primary battle at the moment.

It’s a stunning rise for a politician who has been a Democrat for less than two years. Bollier announced she was leaving the Republican Party in December 2018, voicing frustrations with Trump and the rhetoric of party leaders.

“At some point, you realize if you’re going to be effective and still be able to keep moving good public policy forward, you’ve got to be in a place where you can work, be allowed to,” Bollier said.

Republicans, who are engaged in a primary with four competitive candidates, haven’t yet turned their full attention to fighting Bollier. But Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle offered a possible preview of how conservatives will attack in the fall.

Wagle, who ran her own campaign for U.S. Senate this year before dropping out, said Bollier’s party swap was more political opportunism than an act of conscience. She predicted voters will view her as an unreliable candidate and that neither Republicans or Democrats will trust her.

“She perceived that in her district voters were moving to the left and she endorsed Democrats while she was a Republican,” Wagle said. “And I think she did that thinking that she would have more influence in the Democrat Party and the Democrat Party would win seats.”

Bollier emphasized that her views haven’t changed. She said she still holds to the values that made her a moderate Republican, including a willingness to listen and a belief in local control.

It’s the Republican Party that changed, she said.

“I’m on the phone enough right now with people all over this state who tell me the exact same thing. They’re struggling to recognize the Republican Party of Nancy Kassebaum, of that era,” Bollier said. “Like, what happened?”

Bollier was the first of a handful of moderate Republican state lawmakers who switched parties at the tail end of 2018. Sen. Dinah Sykes, of Lenexa, announced her own change less than a week later.

Sykes said the two had talked about making the leap to the Democratic side together or even if they should serve as independents.

“And then I was like, ‘Barbara, you’re ready. You go. I’m not quite there yet,’” Sykes said. “She never pressured me. We talked about it. It’s just a huge decision, probably even more so for her than even because she had grown up in a Republican family.”

‘Incredible divisions, incredible arrogance’

Bollier grew up steeped in medicine and moderate Republican politics. Her mother, Betty Goolsbee, was a precinct committeewoman who attended college with Kassebaum at the University of Kansas.

Robert Goolsbee, also an anesthesiologist, led the founding of one of the first free-standing ambulatory surgery centers in the United States in the 1970s. To make it happen, he lobbied both the Kansas and Missouri legislatures to legalize surgeries outside of hospitals.

Goolsbee’s centers are today known as Surgicenter, with locations in both Kansas and Missouri.

“I certainly understood the importance, as a physician, of being involved in the system,” Bollier said. “So many physicians, they’re just too busy and they just practice medicine. But I understood why you as a physician need to advocate for your patients and be involved in that system because they made all the rules and all the laws. So you needed to be paying attention.”

Bollier’s legislative career began in 2010 when Republican precinct committee members appointed her to replace a state representative who had been appointed to the state Senate. She ran for the state Senate in 2016.

Bollier retired relatively early. She initially took a year off to help care for a family member, but then became increasingly involved as a volunteer with the Center for Practical Bioethics.

Bollier said she had been questioning what she was supposed to be doing with her life and when she learned of the legislative vacancy, some people told her she should seek the seat.

“I believe that it was what I needed to be doing. My skill set was so needed,” Bollier said, adding that the Affordable Care Act was just going into effect at the time. “I had always said we need people in government who know the system and can actually help run it.”

At a time of “incredible divisions and incredible arrogance” in politics, Bollier studies, ponders and speaks with others before coming to a conclusion, said Rosell, the bioethicist. She has the instincts to approach ethics like a philosopher, he said.

Rosell said over the past decade he’s repeatedly asked her why she’s in politics, telling her it must drive her crazy to be surrounded by people that he believes aren’t thinking carefully.

“Again and again, she says, ‘Well, Terry, I have to. Some of us have to do this,’” Rosell said. “She is duty driven.”