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Increasingly, experts say, they are people coming to the region for the quality of life, bringing with them a greater tolerance on social issues and a less allergic reaction to government spending.

Floyd Ciruli, a longtime Colorado pollster, pointed to the overwhelming passage in November of a measure to boost sales taxes in the Denver metropolitan area to pay for a massive expansion of public transit.

"These are voters in play who don't have any particular attachment to a party," said Ciruli. In fact, in several Western states — including California — the ranks of political independents are rapidly swelling at the expense of both major parties.

If there is an opening for Democrats, several political analysts say, it is in the social issues that animate the Republican Party base but collide with the Western ethos of live and let live.

"The main chance Democrats have is if the Republicans become perceived, even more so than they are now, as the party of morality and not the party of low taxes," said Ted G. Jelen, a political scientist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. [...]

But showing up is just a start. Democrats need to talk in a "Western voice" that resonates with voters and lays to rest old stereotypes, said Pat Williams, a Montana congressman for 18 years until retiring in 1997.

Williams, a fellow at the O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, a policy center at the University of Montana, said when it came to environmental issues, he "seldom mentioned the word 'wilderness' because that denoted the national government setting aside huge pieces of a state. Instead, I always talked about clean places to fish, hunt and camp."

Gov. Schweitzer is blunter still. Seated in the governor's modest office in Helena, he is the very image of Western informality in bluejeans and a loosely fitted bolo tie.

"Don't dress like a lawyer," he counsels his fellow Democrats. "Don't talk like a lawyer. And be prepared to go out and meet people and answer their questions straight. Don't wiggle around and sort of be with them and sort of be against them…. I think most people don't spend the time to figure what all the issues are all about. They want to know you have a heart and a backbone."

As you know, I lived in the Middle East, and I learned to speak Arabic. I had misgivings from the very beginning. We were told that this incursion was going to make the world a safer place. But that didn't square with me because I knew, in the Middle East, the days of the Crusades are like they happened just a few years ago. Any incursion of the West into Islamic cultures is going to be met with resistance. So now we say that, really, the reason we [went] there was to create democracies, and democracies will spring up [throughout the region].

But here's the problem. Our closet allies in the Middle East would be? Saudi Arabia, with a functional king; Kuwait, with a functional king; Jordan, with a functional king; Egypt, with a -- I don't know -- president for life. Israel, it does have a democratic republic. But what do you think our allies are saying when we're standing there saying, "We are going to let democracy rise up"? Well, that's pretty threatening to them. So I don't know what the endgame is here.

You know, I've had people say to me, "But when you're attacked, you've got respond." I agree. I think we should have gone to Afghanistan and turned over every single rock until we got Osama bin Laden. And I would personally put his head on a stick; I would do that.

That's the place we needed to be. The problem is that somehow we got diverted along the way and we went into Iraq. Now, we had Iraq tamed better than any other country in the world. They couldn't even take off or land a plane or even move a truck in the desert. We had airplanes over Iraq, 24/7, for years. We don't over Iran. So why Iraq? I haven't got the answer yet. I'm still asking the question.