The last Topeka Buzz we published covered First Adjournment on March 27. Then we stopped. Not because nothing was happening — because everything was, and almost none of it was happening on the public record in a form we could responsibly cover in real time.

BillBee works by pulling bill drafts and roll-call votes from the Kansas Legislature’s website, usually within 24 hours of action. That pipeline holds up beautifully during regular session. It falls apart in the final 48 hours and during the veto session, because the bills that pass in those windows mostly aren’t moving through normal legislative procedure. They’re being assembled inside conference committees (the small panels where House and Senate negotiators reconcile differences)…and increasingly, “reconciling differences” means gutting an unrelated bill and stuffing it with new content. Sometimes the final language doesn’t appear on the public website for a week. Sometimes longer.

So I’ll level with you. In those final days, I didn’t give up on covering the session. I gave up on covering it responsibly. Legislators were being asked to vote on bills they hadn’t read, on timelines that made district consultation impossible, on procedural vehicles designed to bypass debate. Writing a daily Buzz that pretended the documentary record was keeping pace would have misled readers about how this legislature actually works.

If you want my personal take on what passed in those dark-of-night votes: I dislike most of it, and I suspect most Kansans would too if they’d seen it before it became law. But the bigger story isn’t any single bill. It’s that the 2025–2026 biennium delivered exactly what we predicted leadership wanted from the start of the compressed session calendar: less time, less debate, more leverage for leadership, less accountability to districts. The process worked as designed: for the people who designed it.

That’s behind us. Ahead of us is August 4 and the primary election, and a 2026 cycle that will shape Kansas politics for a decade. We’re shifting our analytical focus there.

Earlier this year we built SimKansas, a county-level forecasting tool we launched alongside our March deep-dive on the U.S. Senate race. We’ve since added models for the Republican and Democratic gubernatorial primaries, and the underlying infrastructure can support any race where there’s enough information to forecast.

A note on what we can and can’t do: Capitol Bee is published by Civic Clarity, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We can’t endorse candidates, and best practice is to go quiet on specific races in the weeks immediately before an election. So between now and roughly mid-July, we’ll spend time helping you understand how the models work and what assumptions drive them. After that, the analysis is yours to use.

(One other thing to keep in mind as you read what follows: I used to run a research agency. I’ve done a lot of survey-based work and statistical modeling, though it’s been a long time since I did political polling specifically. The models are honest about their uncertainty.)

When we last wrote about Adam Hamilton on March 5, he had announced an exploratory committee and committed to a decision shortly after Easter. The deadline he set himself — ten days after Easter — was April 15. It came and went. As of this writing, Hamilton is still deliberating.

The delay matters because the math of his candidacy depends on which lane he chooses. Broadly, three blocs decide a Kansas Senate race: Republicans who will vote for Sen. Roger Marshall regardless; Democrats and disaffected voters who will vote against Marshall regardless; and a contested middle of unaffiliated voters and crossover Republicans. The question for Hamilton isn’t whether he can win the second group. It’s whether, by joining or not joining the Democratic ticket, he attracts more crossover than he loses in partisan loyalty.

Our model still suggests his clearest path is as an independent, but that path requires a convergence of conditions, not any one of them: not bleeding too many Democrats over abortion or other cultural positions; not facing a galvanizing Democratic nominee who splits the anti-Marshall vote; and raising real money, in the tens of millions, because this is a Senate seat, not a state house race.

There’s a new wrinkle since our March piece. On his April listening tour, Hamilton said he would caucus with Democrats if elected. That’s a meaningful answer to the question he ducked in February…and one that probably narrows his independent appeal to crossover Republicans even as it reassures Democratic voters worried about wasted ballots. Whether his ultimate decision is “run as an independent,” “run as a Democrat,” or “don’t run,” the announcement his team is weighing right now is mostly a bet on which of those assumptions they trust most and which they think they can move.

The Democratic primary is the cleaner story. There are three filed candidates, but realistically Sen. Ethan Corson and Sen. Cindy Holscher are the only two with the fundraising and profile to win. Through the end-of-2025 filing, Corson had raised more than twice as much as Holscher. He also picked up Gov. Laura Kelly’s endorsement. Holscher, in turn, has been more aggressive on volunteer recruitment and online presence, and probably has a higher unaided name recognition.

The model gives Holscher a narrow edge by default, but the only public polling we’ve seen came from her own campaign in January, before the Kelly endorsement. That’s thin evidence to project into August. We’ve built the model to incorporate prediction markets and any new polling as it appears, and we’ll update as data comes in.

The Republican primary is, frankly, a mess. Nine candidates are filed at last count. Prediction markets currently favor either Senate President Ty Masterson or former Gov. Jeff Colyer. Masterson brings Topeka relationships and supermajority leadership; Colyer brings name recognition and a sizable war chest. Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Insurance Commissioner Vicki Schmidt round out the top tier. As with the Democrats, there’s no useful public polling yet — but with a fragmented field, even modest movement can scramble the order. We’ll keep watching.

Capitol Bee is a labor of love, and I mean that in both senses of the phrase. My wife — recruited into this somewhat against her will, though she would probably claim wholeheartedly now — and I have poured a lot of time into it for two years. Every issue is hours of reading, writing, and analysis, and every issue asks something of you, too: your time, your attention, your willingness to read carefully about a slow-moving institution.

Honestly? I’m not sure a long-form newsletter is still the best vehicle for the kind of work we want to do. Going forward, Capitol Bee as a publication is likely to slow down for the balance of the year while we figure out where we can have the most impact.

What I’d really like is to hear from you. What have you found valuable these last two years? Is the cadence too much, not enough? Are there formats — short briefings, the forecasting tools, BillBee summaries, something we haven’t built yet — that would serve you better than another long-form essay in your inbox?

A short feedback survey is here. It will take five minutes and it will genuinely shape what we do next.

We’ll keep covering the 2026 cycle through the primaries. We’ll keep updating SimKansas as the field clarifies. And we’ll keep being honest with you about what we know, what we don’t, and where the limits of responsible coverage are.

Thanks for reading.

Capitol Bee is a nonprofit civic journalism project of Civic Clarity, Inc. We don’t have a paywall because we believe transparent government reporting should be accessible to everyone. State legislative bills are analyzed at BillBee.ai. Election forecasts live at forecast.capitolbee.com. Glossary of terms here.