So tomorrow I’ll do the whole detailed post on it, but at Kosvegas there was this panel that nearly came to blows. Seriously. It was about how to reach out to conservative Southern people and make them vote for their interests, best found in Dem candidates.

Here’s how it’s done, boys. We don’t have to do any work at all. We just have to exploit what’s already there:

“The state is kind of dividing up,” Cigler said. “It’s the Christian right versus the business interests of the Republican party. That’s what Kansas is all about now.”

The Kansas Republican Party, Cigler said, “has been ahead of the curve.”

Ron Freeman, executive director of the state GOP, says the recent defections are due to the personal ambitions of the politicians, not because of any ideological shift.

“To say it’s gone way to the right, that’s not a fair analysis,” Freeman said, noting that two of the party’s four statewide officeholders back abortion rights.

One of those officials, Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger, is opposed in the GOP primary by a candidate opposed to abortion rights. Another moderate, Secretary of State Ron Thornburg, is facing a primary challenge from a female GOP state senator who was reported in 2001 as saying family values began to erode when women got the right to vote.

Some Kansas voters say they feel shut out. “I’m absolutely fed up with the conservative Republicans,” said Richard Meidinger, a retired physician in Topeka. “All the abortion stuff, gay marriage stuff doesn’t belong in the legislative debate.”

Martin Hawver has a name for lifelong members of the GOP like Meidinger: “failed Republicans.” The editor of a respected Kansas political newsletter, Hawver’s Capitol Report, Hawver counts himself among their number, occasionally doing the unthinkable and voting Democratic.

“It used to be you could never go wrong with voting for who the Republicans nominated,” Hawver said. “But that’s changing now. People are a little uneasy.”

Cindy Neighbor is one of them. A veteran member of her local school board and a moderate, Neighbor, 57, unsuccessfully ran against a conservative for an open seat in the statehouse in 2000. She narrowly lost, but won in 2002.

Neighbor wasn’t long for Kansas Republican politics, however. She backed an education bill that could have raised taxes, and party conservatives told her there would be retaliation. She lost the next primary to the same representative she’d ousted two years earlier. Another moderate Republican who’d co-sponsored her bill — Bill Kassebaum, the son of former Kansas U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker — was ousted at the same time.

Now Neighbor’s running for her old seat — as a Democrat.

Republicans to Howard Dean: You’re not wrong.