When state Sen. Annette Dubas of Fullerton announced last month that she is filing to run for re-election to the Legislature from Dist. 34* in 2010, she said she didn’t plan on doing anything different than what she’s already doing — attending public events, meeting with constituents and generally remaining visible within the district. (She repeated that assertion during an interview earlier this week.)

*District 34 consists of Hamilton, Merrick, Nance and parts of Polk and Hall counties, including the cities of Aurora, Central City and Fullerton.

The plan sounds for now like it makes sense: Dubas, a registered Democrat in the formally nonpartisan Legislature, doesn’t have an opponent, and I haven’t heard any opposition to her within the 34th District (although I haven’t solicited any opposition, either). But that may change, if the Nebraska Republican Party has anything to say about it.

The week after Dubas’ announcement, state party chair Mark Fahleson held a listening session in Aurora, with Dist. 34 one of two districts in which the party has already targeted a Democratic incumbent (the other is Dist. 16, home of Sen. Kent Rogert of Tekamah). The party is actively recruiting candidates to run against Dubas and Rogert, and in a post on his blog at the state GOP website, Fahleson had some fighting words for Dubas:

“Senator Dubas is a likable person, but the reality is she votes against her district and sides with the liberal special interests in Lincoln. There are a lot of nice people that I wouldn’t want representing me in the Nebraska Legislature.”

Fahleson went on to compare Dubas’ voting record with the state Chamber of Commerce to former state Sen. Ernie Chambers. (He didn’t specify which special interests Dubas was beholden to, other than to briefly mention the state’s trial lawyers.) He seemed quite exuberant based on the meeting’s turnout, saying, “I’m confident that a Republican will be elected to represent District 34 in November 2010.”

That may seem like crazy talk in a district in which the incumbent senator has drawn little, if any, public opposition. But let’s remember that Dubas nipped her Republican opponent in 2006, Greg Senkbile of Central City, by only about 230 votes, or about 1.7 percent of the vote. On the other hand, the heads of both the state’s political parties are no strangers to rose-colored hyperbole — see their wildly differing takes on Nebraska’s opinion of Obama in this Lincoln Journal Star piece — so talk may be a long ways from action.

At the very least, though, this may be a more interesting campaign than we initially expected.