Welcome to this week’s Capitol Bee, where we’re rethinking advocacy in an era where they have the votes. The policies dismantling public schools, targeting marginalized communities, and consolidating power aren’t theoretical—they’re happening, and traditional tactics aren’t enough to stop them.

Table of Contents

• Never bring a knife to a gun fight…

• Advocacy in a Project 2025 World

• Updates Continue on the DataHive

• Referral Program

Never bring a knife to a gun fight…

There is no shortage of headlines over the past week about Very Bad Things: tariffs and trade wars and mid-air plane collisions and more plane crashes and Medicaid freezes and Medicaid un-freezes and CDC publication bans and disappearing government websites and insurrectionist pardons. I consider myself to be a well-informed consumer of world events, but it’s a bit much to hold in my mind at once.

And we haven’t even talked about Kansas yet! We’ve got the tuberculosis outbreak and the passage of SB 63 (the “Help Not Harm” act that bans gender-affirming care) and a parade of bills designed to erode the public school system: for example, SB 75 (the $125M private school tax credit) and SB 48 (a level of accountability almost certainly guaranteed to eventually cause public school districts to lose accreditation, and a standard that I dare you to find anywhere in the private sector).

Many friends and aligned organizations are working the available channels to improve these bills, or block them, or at least weaken the supermajority’s political will to carry them across the finish line¹ . In other years and other political climates, this may have been an effective strategy. It will not work in 2025. Why?

They 👏 Have 👏 The 👏 Votes 👏.²

I’ve always been more of a strategy guy than a tactician, so allow me for a moment to lift our conversation up above the klaxons and outrage. In Kansas (and DC), the most fervent conservatives we have seen in the American political system in perhaps a century have captured enough systemic power to institute nearly any policy they choose with little direct consequence. This didn’t happen by accident; incremental victories, decade by decade, created the conditions for this moment. They are organized, they have a plan (see: Project 2025), and they are executing that plan.