THE NEVADA GOVERNOR’S RACE

Sunday, Sept. 3, 2006 | 7:15 a.m.

Will what happened in Kansas stay in Kansas?

KANSAS, SOMEWHERE ON INTERSTATE 70 - Subarus stick out here, and this one especially. Its bumper sticker reads: "Kansas. As bigoted as you think."

Evolution may be a fact of life in many places, but not here, where it's the subject of an ongoing political debate. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win Kansas was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, the year Louis Armstrong had a hit with "Hello Dolly."

And yet, Kansas has a Democratic governor who's cruising to re-election this year.

The last Republican presidential candidate to lose Kansas was Barry Goldwater, the father of conservative politics, midwife of the Reagan revolution and favorite son of Arizona. Although Arizona has been friendlier to Democrats than Kansas, it still has two Republican senators, and President Bush won there twice.

And yet, Arizona has a Democratic governor speeding toward re-election this year.

Dina Titus, Nevada's Democratic nominee for governor, is hopeful she can replicate the achievements of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano. She often cites them on the campaign trail - Democratic women in west-of-the-Mississippi, Republican states.

Like Titus, some Democratic strategists are looking west with new confidence and urgency. With the South now likely gone Republican forever, they see the new, demographically diverse, growing Mountain West as an important element of any future Democratic majority, despite the Republicans' historical advantage in the region. A new wave of Democratic governors in the West has exploited Republican scandal and division over social issues and captured the center, which Democrats say foreshadows a trend toward Western parity.

Unfortunately for Titus, Nevada - as in so much else - may be the outlier, the place unlike anyplace else. Titus shares similarities to other Western Democrats, but she's not as in step with them as she would like to believe.

Kansas, for instance, actually has a three-party system: Democrat, moderate Republican and conservative Republican, said Burdett Loomis, a University of Kansas political scientist and former communications adviser to Sebelius.

To call conservative Republicans in Kansas "conservative" may be understating where they are on the spectrum. In 1999, conservatives on the state board of education stripped evolution from the school curriculum. State Sen. Kay O'Connor once questioned whether women should be allowed to vote. The Republican attorney general last year demanded the medical records of 90 women and girls from two abortion clinics.

These hardliners have met opposition from the party's social moderates, many of them in Topeka, Lawrence and the suburbs of Kansas City. The moderates call themselves "traditional Republicans," said Sue Peterson, chief lobbyist for Kansas State University and an instructor in Kansas politics. They place themselves in the state's long tradition of Republicanism, epitomized by Dwight Eisenhower and Bob Dole, both Republicans known to hold ideology in low esteem.

In stepped Sebelius, who has manipulated Republican division to great effect.

"She's a smart person," said Tim Shallenburger, her 2002 opponent and current chairman of the Republican Party. "They made me out to be a right-wing extremist," he said. It's the strongest praise someone in politics can give to an opponent, but his meaning is clear: Sebelius is a shrewd player.

Sebelius has politics in her blood. She is the daughter of an Ohio governor and the daughter-in-law of a Republican Kansas congressman. She served in the state Legislature and rose to leadership and then was elected insurance commissioner.

As her running mate in the governor's race, she chose a vice president of Cessna. "It provided reassurance to the business community that we wanted their input," Sebelius said. With the state in fiscal trouble, she ran on a promise to streamline government, leaving nothing untouched - except education.

She was pro-business, but pro-education, a Catholic, but pro-abortion rights, a steady moderate in a Kansas cyclone of radicalism. "You couldn't get elected here any other way," Loomis said. She won by 65,000 votes, or 8 percentage points.

"She's as good a politician as I've seen," said former Democratic Gov. John Carlin, who teaches political science at Kansas State.

Kansas political watchers say she has governed the way she campaigned, and she's on her way to re-election.

Like Sebelius, Arizona's Napolitano held a statewide elective office before running for governor. As attorney general, "She had a tough law-and-order background that she could bring with her to the table," said Rodolfo Espino, an Arizona State University political scientist.

And like Kansas, the Arizona Republican Party has splintered.

Barry Dill, a political consultant close to Napolitano, said the Republican Party has broken into four parts: moderates, traditional conservatives, religious conservatives and what he termed "xenophobes."

Napolitano, recently named the first chairwoman of the National Governors Association, has used much the same winning strategy as Sebelius in the face of Republican division, Arizona political watchers say.

"She has a terrific relationship with business and traditional Republican constituencies," said Ron Ober, a lobbyist and consultant who ran campaigns for former longtime Sen. Dennis DeConcini. (At DeConcini's urging, then-President Bill Clinton named Napolitano a U.S. attorney in 1994.)

Dill said she built her agenda around two interrelated goals: draw high-technology companies and improve education, which allowed her to win friends among both the business community and parents of school-age children.

(Napolitano and her staff declined a request for an interview.)

Espino said Napolitano has what he called a "Clinton-like pre-emptive issue radar" - the ability to sense what's right over the horizon and capture it. Before immigration became such a white-hot issue, for instance, she declared a state of emergency on the border and sent the National Guard.

"She crowds the ground of her conservative opponents," Espino said.

After winning by 12,000 votes in 2002, the results won't be close this time. She's running at 65 percent in the polls and scared off any serious challenger, said Bruce Merrill, a political scientist who conducts polls for ASU. David Berman, a senior fellow at ASU's Morrison Institute for Public Policy, said polls show Napolitano will win the votes of one in three registered Republicans and dominate among unaffiliated voters.

Dominant victor ies by Sebelius and Napolitano will have national implications, and not just because both are frequently mentioned as potential vice presidential candidates or Cabinet secretaries.

Democrats looking toward November - and for that matter, 2008 - are calling on a strategy shift. They're looking to a pan-Western strategy that would try to flip states in the Mountain West.

Tom Schaller is a political scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who's publishing a book this fall about Democrats in the West. Democrats should abandon the South and go west, he said in an interview. Its changing population and rapid growth make it prime for Democratic parity.

In January 2001, he said, none of the interior Western states had Democratic governors. Now, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona are all led by Democrats, while the case can be made that Kansas fits the profile of these Western states.

Schaller notes that evangelical conservatives have an outsized influence in the Republican parties of many of these states. Overall, however, voters tend to be socially moderate. This has given Democrats the chance to seize the middle ground, promising to efficiently deliver services and leave religion in the church pew. By dumping gun control, Democrats cleared an important cultural hurdle.

For Republicans, the lessons from Arizona and Kansas and other Western states should be obvious, as Shallenburger, the Kansas Republican chairman, conceded: Resist the influence of radical social conservatives and stick to the issues all Republicans can rally around - low taxes, tough on crime, sound government.

"It's a lesson, but I don't think it's going to be a lesson learned," said Jennifer Duffy of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

Enter Nevada and the state Senate minority leader running for governor.

To some degree, Titus has an easier go of it than Sebelius, Napolitano and the other Western Democrats. She faces a much smaller disadvantage in party registration, and Sen. John Kerry did better in Nevada than in most other Western states. (He lost by 2 1/2 percentage points.)

But Nevada, with its long history of libertarianism, has very little in the way of a social conservative movement. For example, voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure in 1990 to codify abortion rights.

"You do have the Mormons, but it's certainly not the same," said David Damore, a UNLV political scientist and Titus supporter.

Nevada Republicans are more unified around fiscal conservatism, rarely engaging in the types of divisive debates about social issues that can turn off socially moderate voters. As such, that may give Titus less of an opportunity to pick up moderate Republicans.

Although Republicans had a competitive primary last month, most of the party and its financial backers have fallen in behind Rep. Jim Gibbons, the Republican candidate. Moreover, Gibbons beat a more conservative challenger, state Sen. Bob Beers, R-Las Vegas.

Titus, on the other hand, won her primary against Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson by running as the "true Democrat," a phrase meant to distance her from Gibson's centrist politics.

"Napolitano and Sebelius ran as strong moderates," Cook said. "I don't see Titus doing that. It's hard to pivot out of the primary in which you run as the 'true Democrat.' "

Titus disagreed, of course. She pointed to apparent divisions in the Republican Party, where Gov. Kenny Guinn can't seem to bring himself to endorse Gibbons by name, as well as a still-contested primary in the 2nd Congressional District. (Gibson has not yet endorsed Titus, either.)

Sebelius and Napolitano also are known as conciliators and bridge-builders wary of attack politics. Although Titus has been known to work across the aisle in the Senate, she has an aggressive, attacking style that was on full display in the Democratic primary.

Still, she cited her record on restraining property taxes and encouraging economic-development legislation as evidence of ties to the business community. Her biggest financial backers include casinos and large corporations.

She's a proud gun owner, she tells crowds.

"Arizona, Montana, that's the kind of Democrats who can get elected, and that's the kind of Democrat I am," Titus said.

Schaller said without evangelical conservatives to divide the Republican Party, Titus must convince voters that Nevada needs better schools, better roads, and clean and plentiful water, and that she'll deliver those services in the leanest way possible.

One advantage for Titus is the state surplus, which will allow her to propose new and expanded programs without an immediate tax increase.

Still, it's a tough sell in a state that has historically shunned government and the taxes required to pay for it.

She has until Nov. 7 to make her case.