Now-former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach

Republican Kris Kobach, whose time as Kansas secretary of state mercifully came to an end on Monday, has been considering a Senate run, but he has some more immediate concerns. Grand jury proceedings are set to begin next week investigating allegations of election-related crimes by Kobach’s office.

Kansas is one of a few states that allows citizens to collect petitions to initiate grand juries, and a local man named Steven Davis, who unsuccessfully ran for the state House in 2016 and 2018 as a Democrat, did just that in 2017. Davis alleges that in 2016, Kobach’s office failed to properly register a number of people who had tried to register to vote when they renewed their driver’s licenses or filled out an online form. Kobach’s office denies any wrongdoing, saying that the allegations come from a brief period when the online voter registration systems were malfunctioning and claiming that both state and local officials worked to make sure people affected by the problem could vote.

Meanwhile, another potential GOP Senate candidate looks like he’s doing anything but preparing for a Senate run. Former Rep. Kevin Yoder, who lost re-election last year to Democrat Sharice Davids by a wide 54-44 margin, just took a job at the lobbying firm HHQ Ventures. Normally, we don’t note when a former member of Congress takes a job on K Street (in fact, it’s really more notable when a former member of Congress doesn’t take a job at a lobbying firm), but Yoder probably wouldn’t be doing this if he planned to seek elected office soon.

For what it’s worth, Yoder hasn’t directly expressed interest in running for the Senate, though he has yet to rule out the idea. Back in November, about a week after his defeat, the Kansas City Star reported that he’d been approached by donors and GOP operatives about a possible bid but said he thought it was too early to decide.

Interestingly, though, one of Yoder’s new bosses will be none other than his former GOP House colleague, Ben Quayle of Arizona, who co-founded HHQ Ventures a few years after his 2012 loss (the Q is for potatoe). Between Yoder, who went skinny dipping in the Sea of Galilee, and Quayle, who used to write for a gossip site called Dirty Scottsdale under the pseudonym “Brock Landers,” we have quite a dream team.