COLUMBIA - A year and a half before the next election for S.C. governor, Democrats are about to launch their attempt to unseat incumbent Republican Mark Sanford.

It appears they already have their preferred candidate. State Sen. Tommy Moore of Aiken, a 25-year legislative veteran, is readying a run. In addition, Florence mayor Frank Willis said recently that he is seriously considering running.

Democratic leaders have already signaled the kind of campaign they'll run against Sanford.

"He's been ineffective," said state Democratic Party chairman Joe Erwin. "He's had Republican majorities in the House and in the Senate, and he has not gotten an agenda accomplished that has made our state successful. We are going backwards in almost everything that matters."

It's true that few of the major proposals on which Sanford ran in 2000 have passed.

• His $1 billion-a-year state income tax cut for everyone was chopped down last month into a $100,000 tax break for small businesses.

• His campaign to make state government more efficient and accountable by consolidating more of it under the governor's office has made little progress.

• His plan to give tax credits to parents statewide for home-school expenses or private-school tuition appears destined, at most, to become a pilot project limited to two of the state's 85 school districts.

Rather than work with lawmakers, Erwin said, Sanford has resorted to stunts like bringing a pair of squealing pigs to the State House last year to protest what he said were pork barrel projects passed over his vetoes. At times, the governor has been barely on speaking terms with GOP legislative leaders.

In a normal political situation, said Winthrop University political science professor Scott Huffmon, those facts could spell trouble for an incumbent governor, even one who is a Republican in a Republican-dominated state. But, Huffmon said, there are special circumstances that make Sanford extremely hard to beat.

"Mark Sanford seems to enjoy a popularity that most observers would not have expected," Huffmon said. Polls taken during the 2004 election campaign showed Sanford's job approval rating above 60 percent. No S.C. governor since Carroll Campbell, who left office in 1993, has had such high numbers.

That popularity, observers say, exists not in spite of Sanford's uneasy relationship with lawmakers, but instead, is a result of it.

"I think what sticks out in people's minds was his show of bringing the two piglets into the State House," Huffmon said. "Mark Sanford has this way of doing things that comes across as pricking holes in over-inflated egos of all kinds, and that resonates with the common man."

Sen. Greg Gregory, R-Lancaster, is one of only a handful of strong Sanford allies in the Senate. Gregory said one reason for Sanford's modest track record with lawmakers is that, unlike a long line of previous governors, he never served in the legislature.

"He's an outsider combined with being an iconoclast -- somebody who is bent on change and who is not concerned with playing legislative games," Gregory said.

Gregory said that to fairly judge Sanford's effectiveness, it's necessary to go beyond a checklist of bills that have passed.

"Whether he gets credit or not, he's succeeded in dictating what's been debated and acted on in Columbia," Gregory said.

An example is the recently passed bill that lowers income taxes on small business to 5 percent from 7 percent, he said. "That bill never would have come about had he not originally proposed doing away with income taxes. What he got was a long way from what he asked for. But that's the way things work in politics."

Huffmon agreed, saying that Sanford has been masterful in reshaping the debate on key state issues like education.

"It's no longer, `How much more money does our public education system need?' " Huffmon said. "It's, `How much more are we going to waste on this broken education system before we do something to help the people?' "

But many Republican lawmakers are opposed to Sanford's tuition tax credit plan because they fear it will drain money out of the public schools. And Democrats -- who are uniformly hostile to the idea -- think they have an issue on which they can run against Sanford.

"We're not funding education at the mandated state law level, and the governor is just AWOL on that issue because of this fascination he has with taking state funds and putting them into private schools," Erwin said.

Sanford is the subject of an admiring article in the April 25 issue of the conservative national political journal, "National Review," which praised "his efforts to slash taxes and limit the growth of government."

But Erwin said he thinks Sanford is out of touch with "average people's lives and challenges. And the Democratic nominee is going to point that out."