In New York state, The Post's Fredric U. Dicker reports that Hillary Clinton's most able challenger has bowed out of the US Senate race.

Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro has ruled out running against Hillary Rodham Clinton for the U.S. Senate, and instead is weighing a race for governor or attorney general, GOP insiders said last night.

The insiders said Pirro, who announced two months ago that she wouldn't seek re-election in order to run for statewide office next year, was in the final days of making her decision — and was consulting such important party figures as Gov. Pataki, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and, possibly, Mayor Bloomberg.

State Republican leaders had viewed Pirro as their strongest challenger to Clinton and were trying to persuade her to take on the former first lady.

The Senate race in West Virginia is also heating up these days. The Charleston Gazette's Tom Searls reports.

With the general election still 15 months away, U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd launched a television ad campaign this week to counteract commercials being run by the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“It’s not the beginning of a campaign, but a response,” said Charleston attorney Ned Rose, who heads the Friends of Robert C. Byrd Committee.

While three Republicans have announced plans to run against the state’s senior senator in 2006, most political observers are awaiting an announcement by Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., about her plans.

So far, neither Byrd nor Capito have announced their candidacies.

But not all political observers see it that way. “This has to be the earliest start of any Senate election in West Virginia,” Robert Rupp, a West Virginia Wesleyan professor, said of the warring ads.

And in Kansas, the strongest challenger to Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius has decided against running, reports Scott Rothschild for the Lawrence Journal-World.

U.S. Rep. Jerry Moran on Tuesday announced he would not seek the Republican nomination for governor, a decision that Democrats touted as more evidence that the GOP was mired in internal political warfare.

“The extreme conservative leadership of the Kansas Republican Party continues to alienate its moderate members,” Kansas Democratic Party Chairman Larry Gates said.

Moran, of Hays, is one of those rare Kansas Republicans who appealed to both moderates and conservatives.

[...]

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, who is expected to run for re-election may have had something to do with Moran not running, Washburn political science professor Bob Beatty said.

Even though Republicans enjoy a significant advantage over Democrats in voter registration, Moran would have had a tough race against Sebelius, Beatty said.