A year ago, in assessing nascent opposition to some of Gov. Sam Brownback’s policies, I quoted Winston Churchill’s famous lines: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Bearing in mind the precipitous drop in tax revenues and the death spiral of Brownback’s approval ratings, Republican senators like Jeff King, of Independence, and Jim Denning, of Johnson County, had begun to question the income-tax exemptions of 330,000 small businesses. Fast forward a year, and King has declined to seek re-election, while Denning is locked in a close re-election battle, even as he has sought to modify Brownback’s tax policies.

Some of the key decisions of the 2016 campaign were being made in the fall of 2015. Potential moderate Republican and Democratic candidates could anticipate an upcoming election that would be a referendum on the Brownback administration, featuring taxes and a host of other policies, from Medicaid expansion to the delivery of social services to raids on highway funds.

No matter what voters think on given issues, effective candidates must put themselves forward to translate opinion into campaign discussions and legislative actions. Recruiting candidates is difficult, but overall an impressive array of moderate candidates — both Republicans and Democrats — have emerged over the past year, from the Johnson County suburbs to medium sized-communities like Leavenworth and Pittsburg to Wichita to the expansive districts of western Kansas.

In 2014 Democrat Paul Davis’ attempt to hold Brownback accountable was seriously compromised by the immense outside spending on behalf of incumbent senator Pat Roberts, which nationalized the gubernatorial election. But this year national forces have played a lesser role in Kansans’ decisions, especially in the GOP legislative primaries, where many Brownback allies either did not run for re-election or lost, often by wide margins.

Republicans this year must run not only with the Brownback albatross but also with the uncertainty of Donald Trump’s wavering support, especially in Johnson County, where he trails by 10 points or so. Moreover, various suburbs have become more Democratic over the past few years, and the outcomes of some moderate Republican-Democrat races will demonstrate the extent of this trend.

In short, this Tuesday Kansans can profoundly reshape the legislative mix in Topeka over the next two years, and beyond.

Running parallel to the legislative races are the retention elections for Supreme Court justices. In 2014, two sitting justices came close to losing their seats, and their opponents anticipated that in 2016 they could unseat the four incumbents they opposed, largely based on death penalty and school finance rulings.

It now appears, based on public and private polling, that the opposition campaign has faltered. The retention and rejection forces have raised roughly equal amounts of money, but the retention supporters enjoy the advantage of supporting justices who Brownback, the least popular chief executive in the country, has vigorously opposed. In addition, pro-public education sentiments favor the incumbents, who have consistently ruled that more state funding for public education is required.

For many, the 2016 election will be defined by the unlikely emergence of Donald Trump and his bizarre campaign, but for Kansans, who will reluctantly give Trump their six electoral votes, the real news is that an independent judiciary and a more moderate Legislature may well increase the chances of more responsible governance to address the state’s profound array of problems.

Maybe, just maybe, our 2016 elections will be “the beginning of the end.”

— Burdett Loomis is a professor of political science at the University of Kansas.