Topeka ? While most people in Kansas are spending the Labor Day weekend relaxing with friends and family and bidding a fond farewell to summer, there is another group of people who can’t wait for this weekend to be over.

That’s because in addition to marking the end of summer, Labor Day weekend also marks the traditional kicking-off point of the general election campaign.

And like sprinters on their marks waiting for the starting gun to sound, politicians and party officials on both sides of the aisle are poised to burst into full speed in their race to the finish line.

Kansas voters this year will cast ballots for president and vice president. They’ll also vote in races for the U.S. House and one U.S. Senate race, along with races for the Kansas House and Senate, various county offices and judicial retention elections.

“You’ll definitely start seeing TV ads, mailers and some polling,” said Kansas Democratic Party executive director Kerry Gooch. “You’ll start seeing Democrats out in force, knocking door to door, going to neighborhood meetings, even some house events.”

Clay Barker at the Kansas Republican Party is expecting the same thing.

“Right now, everybody is assessing what happened (in the primaries) and developing plans that will be implemented in September,” Barker said.

Barker and Gooch both said that some of their candidates might spend the first week or so after Labor Day focused on polling.

But those polls won’t the “horse race” polls that just measure who’s ahead or behind in the race. They’ll be the kind of “internal” polls that the public rarely sees, identifying which demographic groups are most likely to support the candidate, and which issues or messages are most effective at motivating them to turn out and vote on Election Day.

Out of those polls will come the specific language that voters will hear on radio and TV ads, and on the postcards that will soon start showing up in mailboxes throughout Kansas.

But candidates and their party organizations aren’t the only ones conducting those polls. Nor will they be the only ones waging ad campaigns.

Both Barker and Gooch said they expect independent third-party organizations to be heavily involved in the 2016 races. Those will include such groups as the Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity, which support fiscal conservative Republicans, as well as the Kansas National Education Association and the Mainstream Coalition which support moderate Republicans and Democrats who favor increased funding for education.

There may also be third-party groups that no one has even heard of yet.

“I think you’ll see some of what you saw in the (1st Congressional District) primary where they come in and hire a specialized group to run a PAC or a 501(c)(4),” Barker said.

Like the parties and the candidates themselves, Barker said, the goal of the independent groups is to identify voters who are likely to turn out and target them with messages aimed at swaying their votes.

Barker said he doesn’t expect to see third-party groups get active until about mid-October, near the time when advance balloting begins. But Gooch said he thinks they could start running their campaigns as early as mid-September.

One of the issues that both parties know will be dominant this year is Republican Gov. Sam Brownback. Although he won’t even be on the ballot — gubernatorial elections in Kansas run in the opposite cycle from presidential races — recent polls have shown him widely unpopular with voters this year, and so even many Republican candidates will try to put distance between themselves and Brownback.

“I’ve had complaints from some of the moderates who just came out of primaries where they were running against Brownback, and now they’re saying, ‘Why am I suddenly being tagged as Brownback-Lite?'” Barker said.

To counter that, he said, GOP candidates will try to change the conversation, either by focusing on the core differences between the Republican and Democratic parties, or by turning people’s attention to the federal races and the contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Gooch, however, said he did not think turning the focus onto federal races will be that much help for Republicans this year.

“What I tell people is a vote for any Republican this year is a vote for Brownback and a vote for Trump and the terrible policies they support,” he said.

But Gooch and Barker both said this year’s presidential race is the one variable in the election they can’t predict, and which could play either way in certain legislative districts.

That’s because historically, presidential races drive voter turnout, which is typically much higher in presidential election years than nonpresidential years. In 2014, a nonpresidential year, only 50.8 percent of registered voters in Kansas turned out, down from 66.8 percent in the 2012 presidential election.

But this year, both Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton are widely unpopular. And while Democrats tend to view their candidate more favorably than Republicans view theirs, Democrats are a much smaller group in Kansas overall.

Both parties quietly worry that voters who don’t like their presidential candidates will stay home, and thus not vote in the other races further down the ballot. But they also quietly hope that’s exactly what happens to the other party’s voters.

“With this year’s candidates, not sure what it will do for turnout,” Gooch said.