With less than 24 hours left before polls open on Tuesday, Rep. Tom Sloan was still out, walking door to door in west Lawrence, trying to reach any voters he could find who hadn’t already voted.

Sloan, a Republican, said he’s not taking anything for granted this year. Although he has won the 45th District each of the last 11 elections, he faces a strong challenge during a year when voters are saying they are angry and frustrated with the state of affairs in Topeka.

“I’m utterly disgusted, frankly,” said Carol Randel, one of the voters Sloan spoke to Monday.

Sloan said he has been hearing that a lot during this campaign.

“There’s an awful lot of anti-Trump and anti-Brownback sentiment in the district,” Sloan said.

Rep. Tom Sloan, R-Lawrence, talks with west Lawrence residents Carol Randel, center, and Janice Bosco while walking door-to-door in the 45th House District on Monday, the last full day of campaigning before the Nov. 8 general election.

In particular, he said, some voters seem willing to take out their frustrations by ousting any incumbent who has been in office while the state’s financial condition has degraded, even if it’s someone like Sloan who has been a vocal critic of Gov. Sam Brownback’s economic policies.

“There’s a lot of that,” he said. “The Democratic Party has basically put out the same message in a lot of races, that we didn’t do enough to stop the downward trend in the funding of education or the robbing of the Department of Transportation funds. But you can only cast your vote. If you don’t have enough allies, then you can’t stop things.”

Across town, Sloan’s challenger, Lecompton Democrat Terry Manies, spent Monday working the phones from the Douglas County Democratic Party headquarters on West 23rd Street.

Manies said that between herself and other volunteers in the office, she hoped to contact about 200 voters on Monday, either urging them to vote or to turn in the mail ballots they’d already received.

Democrat Terry Manies of Lecompton works the phones from the Douglas County Democratic Party headquarters Monday, contacting voters in a last minute push for the 45th District House seat.

“I feel very good, I really do,” Manies said about the race. “I’ve come a long way. I’ve made fantastic inroads. I’ve knocked on thousands of doors and talked to thousands of people.”

Manies has tried to capitalize off the fact that Sloan has been in the Kansas House for 22 years, arguing that he has been ineffective in opposing Brownback and describing him on her website as a “career politician.”

The 45th District House race is one that political observers will be watching closely Tuesday night. With Brownback’s approval ratings in the 20 percent range or lower, many think there’s an opportunity that Democrats and moderate Republicans could gain enough seats to form a governing coalition in the House, even if neither of them has enough seats to claim the speaker’s office or other leadership positions.

But the 45th District is one of a handful of legislative races where a Democrat is running head to head against a moderate, making it a race where there would be no net gain for either side and one that has the potential of generating animosity between the two factions.

Democrats, however, have other goals besides trying to forge a governing coalition. They currently hold only 28 seats in the 125-member House, so they desperately need to increase their numbers in order to get more seats on House committees. They also need to build a deeper bench of potential candidates for statewide offices in 2018 and beyond.

Republican Jim Karleskint of Tonganoxie spends the last full day of the 2016 campaign contacting voters who have requested advance ballots but haven't yet turned them in. Karleskint is running for the 42nd District House seat.

Another race many will be watching is the 42nd District House race, which includes Eudora and eastern Douglas County, along with portions of Leavenworth County.

There, Republican Jim Karleskint spent the final day of the campaign at his home outside of Tonganoxie, sifting through databases of voters who had requested advance ballots be mailed to them, but who hadn’t yet turned them in.

“We’re cross-checking those because they were due in today (Monday),” Karleskint said. “And then you get on the phone, and try to find good phone numbers,” he said.

Karleskint, a retired school superintendent, unseated longtime incumbent Rep. Connie O’Brien in the Aug. 2 primary, mainly by touting his support for public education and his opposition to Brownback’s tax policies. And he said those are still the issues that most voters talk about when he goes door to door or talks to them on the phone.

“I’d say if there’s a consistent message, they’re concerned about the fiscal situation of the state,” he said. “A lot of people talk about school funding. There’s concern over roads. And also, probably for the last month or month and a half has been concern about the state’s receipts coming up short, and what are you going to do about that.”

Kara Reed, of Tonganoxie, a Democrat running for the 42nd District House seat, spends the last day of the 2016 campaign at her computer pushing out social media ads.

The primary campaign was expensive, and it may have given his Democratic opponent, Tonganoxie City Councilwoman Kara Reed, a slight head start going into the general election.

Like Karleskint, Reed spent her day Monday on the computer at her Tonganoxie home, sending out messages and ads through Facebook and other social media.

“There are a lot of people in this area on social media,” Reed said. “I suspect that has something to do with the fact that we do have a local paper, but it’s a weekly. So frankly, a lot of the news in this community circulates via social media.”

Reed has been aggressive in contrasting herself with Karleskint, painting him as a conservative, even though his positions on school funding and tax policy might be seen as more moderate, compared with Brownback.

The 42nd District, however, tends to lean conservative, especially on social issues such as abortion. That means if Reed were to win, it would be a significant pick-up for Democrats, but a Karleskint win would still represent a potential loss for Brownback and his coalition, at least on certain tax and budget issues.

For many voters, this year’s campaign has seemed unusually long, in part because the presidential race has been in full swing for well more than a year, and in part because Nov. 8 is the latest possible date on the calendar for a general election.

For that reason, many voters like Randel in west Lawrence say they just want the election to be over.

“I’m past ready for it to be over,” she said.