Manhattan ? Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and Democratic challenger Paul Davis scrambled for votes in a tight Kansas governor’s race Saturday, a day after new figures suggested that massive tax cuts Brownback championed could be widening a predicted state budget shortfall.

Brownback’s aggressive tax cuts have cemented his reputation as a reformer in national conservative circles but brought something of a backlash in typically Republican Kansas, leading to a surprisingly close re-election fight.

“The results are in on the Brownback experiment, and it has been a total failure,” Davis told about 70 supporters at a meet-and-greet session in a coffee shop in the Aggieville bar and restaurant district of Manhattan near the Kansas State University campus, before beginning a two-day tour of western Kansas.

The GOP governor started his day in Pittsburg, in southeast Kansas, on the fourth and final day of a bus tour with other prominent Republicans that ended with a rally at the party’s Topeka headquarters. He and his supporters are confident the policies he pursued during his first, four-year term boosted the state’s economy, whatever its short-term budget challenges.

“The state’s economy is good and growing,” Brownback said after the Topeka rally, attended by more than 100 people. “Overall, this economy in this state is performing well.”

The two rivals stumped a day after the state Department of Revenue reported that tax collections fell $23 million short of expectations in October. Before the report, the Legislature’s nonpartisan research staff projected a $260 million budget shortfall by July 2016 — and the gap is likely to widen.

Davis hopes to win Tuesday’s election with support from moderate Republicans and unaffiliated voters uneasy that the tax cuts could lead to cuts in programs such as education and social services. Those voters include Joseph Wenberg, a 21-year-old Kansas State University student and registered Republican from Wichita.

“His policies have made us a fiscal train wreck,” Wenberg said of Brownback.

At Brownback’s urging, legislators cut the state’s top personal income tax rate by 26 percent, exempted the owners of 191,000 businesses altogether — and promised future reductions. At the Topeka rally, Steve and Linda McGinnis of Topeka said the policies benefited small business owners like them.

The couple sells antiques and benefited from the elimination of income taxes for business owners. Linda McGinnis, 67, said if she were younger, she’d consider expanding the business and expects that many business owners are reinvesting their tax savings.

“It’s private-sector jobs, not government jobs, that make our state,” McGinnis said.

The state has seen more robust growth in private-sector employment since Brownback took office in January 2011. Federal statistics show Kansas gained more than 70,000 private sector jobs after December 2010 and through September, growth of 6.6 percent. The state saw its gross domestic product — the total value of all goods and services produced — rise by 6.1 percent from 2010 through 2013, slightly better than the national figure.

But federal employment statistics also show that the state’s private-sector job growth was less robust than the nation’s as a whole after December 2010 — the U.S. figure through September was 8.8 percent. And the state’s private-sector job growth slowed after the tax cuts took effect in 2013 and has been about half the national figure since December 2012.

Kansas Budget Director Shawn Sullivan said any budget challenges are manageable. He announced in September that the administration identified $101 million in potential administrative savings from various initiatives, including consolidating computer systems across state government.