But after publicly criticizing elements of Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax plan this year, Mr. Kelsey found himself among a cluster of conservative Republican state senators that a more conservative coalition here is working to defeat in Tuesday’s primary elections. Kansas politics have been tilting more to the right for at least the last two decades. And now that shift is prompting a bitter clash within the state’s Republican Party. Conservatives are feverishly working to win the Senate and drive out the last remnants of what they see as moderate Republicanism in a state with a deep-rooted history of centrist Republicans in the mold of Bob Dole, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nancy Kassebaum. The divisive primary campaign reflects the ambivalence gripping Republicans across the country, yet the situation here is more complicated than the typical conservative-versus-establishment disputes. What sets the battle in Kansas apart is the distance between the factions. Conservative and moderate Republicans essentially operate as separate parties, and so far, no one — including Mr. Brownback — has stepped forward to try to bridge that gap in the popular tradition of moderation. Instead, each side claims to represent the soul of the party. “We don’t even know what it means to be a Republican in the state of Kansas,” said Casey W. Moore, a conservative Senate candidate from the Topeka area. Nationally, conservatives have been defining the party in their image. Last week, they scored a big victory in Texas when a Tea Party favorite defeated Gov. Rick Perry’s favored candidate in the primary for an open United States Senate seat. That outcome followed conservative victories this year over established Republicans in Senate primary races in Indiana and Nebraska. Kansas conservatives are optimistic that they can do the same on the state level and upend long-held assumptions that the people of their state prefer moderate lawmakers. Two years ago, conservative Republicans here captured a majority in the Kansas House of Representatives — around 70 of 125 seats — for the first time in about four decades, and, for the first time in at least half a century, Kansans elected a conservative governor, Mr. Brownback. Conservatives need to pick up three or four seats to win control of the 40-member Senate, where 14 moderate Republicans and 8 Democrats often vote together to maintain a coalition that gives them a majority. The move toward a more conservative Kansas began about 25 years ago, when a small group of fiscally conservative legislators, feeling marginalized by the Republican leadership, began promoting an agenda that emphasized free markets, tax cuts and reducing government spending. They teamed with grass-roots social conservatives and, in 1994, gained a significant number of seats in the Kansas House and ousted its moderate speaker. Conservatives continued to gain seats in the Legislature, and the rest of the country began to take notice of their brand of politics. “What’s The Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, which was made into a film, documented that rise. Now that conservatives are closer than ever to full control of the state’s government, fighting between the two factions of the Republican Party has become more overt, and nastier. “The conservatives, they hate the moderate Republicans,” said Burdett A. Loomis, a political science professor at the University of Kansas. “They think they really have conspired with Democrats and have prevented conservative forces from their rightful place of dominating the government.” Mr. Brownback is openly challenging the moderate members of his party. Interest groups like the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Americans for Prosperity are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking moderates and rallying support for conservatives. Moderates have gotten a lift from Bill Graves, the former two-term Republican governor who has held fund-raisers for the candidates he supports. Mr. Graves, who was in office from 1995 to 2003, is familiar with intraparty scuffling: the conservative state party chairman resigned to challenge him in 1998, when he successfully ran for re-election. Moderate candidates have also benefited from hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from labor and teachers’ unions.
