Finding Impact When the Game Feels Rigged

With a Little Help From My Friends, The Beatles

Table of Contents

• The Most Important Question

• Winning vs. Losing in Kansas

• Impact = Knowledge x Trust x Amplification

• Sneak Preview: Kansas 2026 Legislature

The Most Important Question

Recently, a reader asked me a question I’ve been wrestling with myself:

“What can one person actually do to influence civic governance in Kansas?”

It’s a fair question—maybe the fair question—because the political landscape we’re operating in is not neutral. Kansas Republicans benefit from a built-in registration advantage, and they have an ecosystem of deep-pocketed corporate backers and SuperPACs that run an industrialized, almost militarized campaign machine:

1. Recruit candidates a year or two in advance

2. Funnel donor networks into their campaigns

3. Carpet-bomb neighborhoods with door tags for months

4. Fill mailboxes with 15–20 pieces of direct mail in a two-week sprint

5. Drown the final days of a race in TV ads, texts, and attack messaging

6. Win—often before the Democrat ever gets a chance to be heard

If you’ve ever felt like the deck is stacked, you’re not imagining it. It is. But that’s not the whole story.

The other half is what we rarely talk about—the part where ordinary Kansans still have enormous leverage, precisely because giant political machines are terrible at something money can’t buy:

Trust.

• A mailer cannot replace a real conversation.

• A TV ad cannot replace a neighbor you know and respect.

• A SuperPAC cannot build authentic community networks.

None of their resources matter if they’re talking at voters while we’re talking with them.

Over the past year, I’ve tried to focus on the “what” of Kansas politics: what’s happening, who’s responsible, what’s at stake. But in the conversations I’ve had with many of you, it’s clear that information alone isn’t enough anymore.

We need to believe that what we’re doing actually matters. We need a framework for impact…not just outrage.

Winning vs. Losing in Kansas

Here’s the distilled version of what separates winning and losing in Kansas:

1. Who will be voting (who’s in the district? what’s their “default” vote?)

2. Why they will or won’t vote (what will make them choose to cast a ballot?)

3. How many meaningful touches we can have with them (who do they trust, where do they get their information, how can that scale?)

Not noisy touches.
Not spam touches.
Not SuperPAC touches.
Meaningful touches.

And that leads me to the framework I’ve started using to think about civic impact—not in theory, but in real Kansas conditions. For Capitol Bee. For me.

Impact = Knowledge x Trust x Amplification

Most of politics (at least the part we’re talking about right now, getting elected) fits into one of three factors:

• Local Knowledge: Understanding your district at a granular level—issues, barriers, priorities, identities, institutions. This is something no national group can outsource or automate.

• Trusted Contact: Real conversations, not transactional ones. When voters hear consistently from people in their actual social world, that overrides 20 pieces of glossy mail every time.

• Network Amplification: This isn’t about money. It’s about multiplying yourself:
  your relationships, your community roles, your organizing circles, your digital reach, your willingness to talk to neighbors or host a gathering or lend your skills.

None of these rely on the resources Republicans dominate. All of them rely on the resources you already have.

Each term multiplies the others; if one of them is zero, your impact is zero. But if you nudge any of them upward, the total impact grows exponentially.

This is asymmetric strategy, the kind that underdogs can win with. And it’s the only kind that will work in Kansas.

Over the next few weeks, heading into the 2026 legislative session, we’re going to dig deeply into each piece of this model: not just why it matters, but how you can use it to make your community stronger and your voice louder.

Because the truth is simple but powerful:

You may not have their money.
But they will never have your relationships.
And that’s where real power still lives.

Sneak Preview: Kansas 2026 Legislature

A scant six weeks from today, the 2026 state legislative session begins. Below are the most significant issues I expect to see tackled in Topeka before the chambers adjourn so folks can go off and campaign: