Republican Gov. Sam Brownback narrowly won re-election Tuesday against Lawrence Democrat Paul Davis, who had led in most public opinion polls throughout most of the campaign.

Davis was trailing by 11 p.m., 49-47 percent, with about 71 percent of the precincts reporting. But complete results had already come in from Johnson and Sedgwick counties, the two most populous counties in the state, where Brownback edged out Davis by slim margins, and it was clear by late evening that there were not enough votes to be had in the remaining precincts for Davis to close the gap.

“Praise be to God that we got across the line,” Brownback declared to cheering supporters at a GOP rally in Topeka, shortly after Davis gave his concession speech in Lawrence.

“Moments ago I called Gov. Brownback and congratulated him on winning a second term,” Davis told a disappointed crowd of supporters who gathered at Abe & Jake’s Landing to watch the election returns. “Sam Brownback is a man of conviction who loves our state. His lifelong dedication to public service is remarkable and I congratulated him on his victory tonight.”

The race had drawn national attention because it was seen as a referendum on Brownback’s conservative economic policies of slashing income taxes and cutting state spending as a way to stimulate the economy.

The result, though, has been a state economy that as not growing as fast as the rest of the nation, and downgrades in the state’s credit rating by agencies that say the tax cuts will put Kansas in a weak financial position in the future.

The 58-year-old governor and his allies painted Davis as a liberal and sought to tie him to Democratic President Barack Obama. Davis, a 42-year-old Lawrence lawyer and the Kansas House minority leader, ran as a centrist.

“Ideas and direction matter, and they matter a lot,” Brownback said. “We’ve made bold moves in the state of Kansas, and in some cases tough moves, to get our state growing again. It has not been easy, but doing the right thing rarely is.”

Preliminary exit polling showed that roughly half of the voters said that tax cuts Brownback pushed had mostly helped Kansas, while about two in five said they had hurt.

The preliminary exit poll of 1,477 Kansas voters was conducted for AP and the television networks by Edison Research.

Donna Featherby, a 57-year-old disabled Wichita resident, voted for Brownback, saying, “I think we need some tax cuts.”

“I felt like he did a good job with the state while he was in office,” Featherby said.

But Dave Zeferjohn, a 79-year-old retired printer and retired Marine captain from Topeka, voted for Davis and said of Brownback’s tax-cutting, “I think he’s not told the entire truth to the public.”

Polls leading up to the election had shown Brownback with high disapproval ratings, even among Republican voters who had indicated they planned to vote for Davis.

In fact, Davis had attracted support from many moderate Republicans, including about 100 former officeholders who argued that Brownback had steered the state too far to the right.

It will take several days to analyze the turnout to determine whether those voters actually showed up at the polls, or whether they were simply outnumbered by Brownback’s supporters.

Regardless, Wint Winter, Jr., a former Republican state legislator from Lawrence who helped organize the group Republicans for Kansas Values which endorsed Davis, said he still felt good about how close Davis came to winning.

“A whole lot of people said we don’t like the direction of Sam Brownback,” Winter said at the election night watch party. “When Sam Brownback thinks about what did this election say about him, it said he’s got to watch what he’s doing.”

Others were more disappointed in the results, and more pessimistic about what will happen to state services, including public education funding, over the next four years.

Duane Goossen, a former budget director under governors Kathleen Sebelius and Bill Graves, wrote recently that because of revenue shortfalls that have already occurred this year, the state could face a $292 million budget gap in the current fiscal year, forcing even further cuts to education and other services.

Brownback’s current budget director, Sean Anderson, has disputed Goossen’s suggestion, saying the administration can find savings and efficiencies in the current budget without having to cut school funding or other social services.