Missouri’s Democratic candidate, Attorney General Jay Nixon, spent most of Sunday in Republican-leaning parts of St. Louis County, the state’s largest voting jurisdiction.

Nixon predicts that the county “will be especially important this time” in determining whether he or Republican Kenny Hulshof, a congressman from Columbia, get to move into the governor’s mansion.

Nixon said that the job losses suffered by the automakers’ cutbacks in their county operations in Fenton and Hazelwood are particularly affecting county families, and making them pay even more attention to his Democratic economic message, and that of the party’s nominee for president, Barack Obama.

But Sunday’s public stops — at a fundraiser in a Chesterfield home, and at a rally at a South County Democratic campaign office — seemed aimed less at converting new voters, and more about energizing current supporters and campaign workers.

(He also was collecting campaign cash during Sunday’s county tour. Besides the Chesterfield event, Nixon had a private evening fundraiser, and made some private finance calls. All those TV ads cost money.)

His chief message focused on the importance of voting, and making sure that like-minded neighbors and friends do the same. At both stops, Nixon garnered chuckles when he observed to the crowds, “Polling places can be dangerous. I advise you to take a large group of people when you go.”

Nixon also observed that voting was the greatest act of equality. “Everyone has the exactly the same amount of power, whether they’re an 18 year old or Bill Gates.”

Nixon confessed to the several dozen guests at the Chesterfield home of Linda Tinker that he needed to find at least one additional vote to replace one that he’d recently lost, when he turned down a woman’s request that he consider planting flowers in the median along Interstate 70 between Kansas City and St. Louis.

The problem, Nixon explained, was that the woman had proposed that the state plant sunflowers in the median.

Nixon said he replied, perhaps a tad too vehemently, that the sunflower was the state flower of Kansas. Nixon touched off laughter when he explained, “I said I would not plant the flower of the Kansas Jayhawks in Missouri!”