Kansas’ Republican State House Speaker is currently the lead attorney in a lawsuit against the state government. But what’s fishy is that the case revolves around the state budget – the same state budget Speaker O’Neal was intimately involved in writing:

O’Neal represents 17 professional groups, including the Kansas Bankers Association and Kansas Association of Realtors, challenging a 2009 legislative decision to take money from the funds of professional regulatory bodies. The groups’ members pay dues that support the regulatory agencies.

Democrats contend it is a conflict of interest. (…)

“Using his position as House speaker to drum up business for his law firm … I don’t see how he can reconcile it,” said House Minority Leader Paul Davis, a Lawrence Democrat.

While O’Neil voted against the particular funds transfer at issue here, we have no idea what went on behind the scenes or what sort of back-room deals were involved. So Kansas voters have no idea if their Republican leader secretly helped engineer this legislation just so he could turn around and sue the State of Kansas.

All we know for certain is that the Republican House Speaker, instead of representing his constituents, is representing the banking industry and 16 other trade groups as they literally try to pry money away from Kansas taxpayers in this lawsuit.

The good publicity for Sean Tevis keeps on rolling. This time he's getting the NPR treatment.

You can read about the piece here but I'd recommend listening to the story (link at the top of the page).

Also -- pay attention to the new numbers that Tevis describes. When he turned in his numbers at the end of last month, he reported raising, "$96,000 from nearly 6,000 people. "

That's twice as many supporters and three times more money than he originally planned for with this cartoon campaign.

Sean Tevis -- my current favorite elected-office-seeking geek -- has gone from profiles on BoingBoing (and DLCC.org!) and landed in the Wall Street Journal.

As you'd imagine, the story is largely about the campaign's fundraising success. So far, Tevis has raised more than $95,000 -- almost entirely from small online donations. His GOP opponent plans to rake in just $35,000 (with very little of that money coming from individuals in his district).

The story includes one detail that I'm both simultaneously relieved and embarrassed that I didn't notice:

Mr. Tevis's coup de grâce was to embed a hidden message, in the source code. He knew that only fellow techies would bother scrolling through the dense lines of programming, so he rewarded them with a message asking them to tack an extra 88 cents on to any donation so he would recognize them. Nearly 20% of his 5,700 or so donors have done that. Mr. Tevis has become such a fund-raising machine that he is fielding calls from legislative candidates in other states asking for advice.

Sure enough, when you pull up the source code, there it is:

Hello person who cares enough to read source code.

Please donate $8.88 to my campaign. Any amount with 88 cents at the end is flagged for me to let me know that it came from someone who I guess is a lot like me. You'll also be entered into a drawing to win a prize and it will help save the world. Thank you.

I just can't get over how terrific and clever this whole thing is.

It’s not easy being a first-time candidate running against an incumbent. Especially if you are a Democrat campaigning in Kansas. To be successful, you need to have something going for you -- even if that’s just the drive to outwork your opponent every day.

But it really does pay to be smart.

Sean Tevis is an information architect from Olathe, Kansas. He’s running against Rep. Arlen Siegfreid, a deeply conservative Republican (even by Sunflower State standards), and apparently, he's got polling showing him running three points back.

He’s also a geek.

Faced with the challenge of raising the $26,000 it will take to make this stage of the race competitive, Tevis found a brilliant, clever way to tell his story and in doing so has captured the imagination of a certain part of the Internet.

Writing in the style of xkcd (a web comic read by the geekiest of geeks), Tevis laid out his reasons for running and asked for 3,000 people to contribute $8.34 to his campaign. And then the Internets responded.

His appeal was picked up by BoingBoing -- an incredibly popular geek culture blog -- and promoted thousands of times by news aggregators Digg and Reddit. All the traffic overwhelmed the servers hosting his website, but the donations kept pouring in.

By 9:30 on Monday morning, 5,298 people had given to his campaign. Previously (as Tevis notes in his comic), no state rep campaign in Kansas had ever attracted even 650 donors, and more remarkable still, Tevis lives in a district where just 6,327 people voted in the last election.

Obviously the specifics of Tevis' story can't necessarily be repeated (no way that every candidate will be able to finance her campaign with a clever comic strip), but there's a whole lot to be said for his creativity.

This is the Internet -- a place where leaders can connect with thousands of passionate potential supporters...if the campaign can find a way to stand out.

(cross posted at TDS)

Democrats won't pick up a chamber in Kansas this fall; I can almost guarantee that.

The Republicans hold a 20 seat advantage in the Senate, and a 31 seat advantage in the House. I'm not giving away any trade secrets when I say that the state isn't one of our top targets this year.

That's not stopping Kansas Democrats, however, from putting in maximum effort.

They're fielding candidates in 36 of 40 Senate districts and in 96 of 125 House districts, all with the aim of making the GOP compete for its majorities.

That's valuable for a number of reasons.

First, even in a state where voter registration favors Republicans by a 2-1 margin, the political climate has damaged the GOP brand. In Kansas, you've also got two-term Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and two Democrats in Congress who are popular and vocal leaders. Here, Democrats might have the potential to pick up some seats this year, even in districts that we don't normally have any business winning.

Second, by running so many candidates, Kansas Democrats force the GOP to spend resources protecting their incumbents that they could otherwise devote to more competitive races. Sure, the U.S. Senate race doesn't exactly seem like it's going to be a highlight (though Jim Slattery does show some life in the latest poll), and Kansas is also one of those states where Obama doesn't stand much of a chance. But competitive GOP incumbents in the statehouse can't count on monetary support from their colleagues who also have opponents. And that's a good thing.

Finally, every additional seat at the legislative table helps to change the conversation in the state. Even if we don't control a majority, we need more Democratic lawmakers talking about health care and education in Kansas. We need more Democratic incumbents developing relationships with constituents and providing leadership for the party. And importantly, even if the Democratic women and men elected this cycle never serve a day in the majority, some of them will some day become future candidates for higher elective office.

One of the things that I like best about the DLCC is our work to win majorities gradually by building infrastructure, providing resources, and training staff. Kansas is one of the states, for instance, taking advantage of our DLCCWeb program -- which provides our candidates with cheap and powerful Internet tools for campaigning.

It's also a place where we can afford to take the long view -- patiently laying groundwork for bigger wins in the future.