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The picture that emerged from last month's elections, at both the state and the federal level, showed a majority of voters weary of hard-line, intransigent ideologues on the far right.

We know that, because voters turned both houses of Congress over to the Democrats and for the first time in many years gave Democrats 27 of the 60 seats seats in the Arizona House of Representatives.

They also re-elected Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, giving her a 27 percentage point victory over her ultra-conservative challenger, Republican Len Munsil.

And so there is some irony, to put it kindly, in the comments from some Republicans who believe the party suffered because its candidates were not conservative enough. That line of thinking suggests that what voters really wanted were tougher, more rigid conservatives.

If that were true, then candidates like Republican Randy Graf, an aggressive conservative who was running for Congress in District 8, should have trounced his Democratic opponent, Gabrielle Giffords. But the opposite happened. Voters told Graf to take a hike and sent Giffords to Washington.

It is remarkable, then, to hear Republicans like Bill Montgomery, who did so poorly in his race against Attorney General Terry Goddard, declare: "The Republican Party took a hit because we strayed from the principles that make our party so strong and that serve to unify our membership, which consists predominantly of fiscal and social conservatives."

This is the same as saying Republican conservatives should stick to the principles that made them unpopular and that voters, for the most part, rejected.

Montgomery was quoted by reporter Daniel Scarpinato in a Star story last Wednesday. We are more inclined to agree with Steve Huffman, a Republican moderate who ran a primary against Graf and lost.

"I think the most important conversation we have to have right now is: 'Are we where the voters are?' " Huffman said.

It's an important, practical question that suggests that candidates should be responsive to voters' concerns.

It makes perfect sense, and if other Republicans were to accept reality they would see that there was nothing mysterious about the election results. Voters rejected the fringes and moved toward the political center. The Republicans in District 8 who rejected Huffman didn't get it.

Many of them would undoubtedly agree with Montgomery, a political novice, who told Scarpinato, "I've always had a problem with the term 'moderate.' If you always take the middle ground, I don't see how that's a virtue. That's not leadership."

On the contrary, we would say that it is both a sign of leadership and a necessary asset to realize the wisdom in compromising on 10 or 20 percent of the issues in order to achieve success on 80 percent of the others.

Compromise is not a dirty word, nor is it fatal to try to understand another viewpoint in the hope of negotiating an issue that gives both sides some of what they're seeking. A case can be made that compromise is a sign of wisdom and maturity.

The point that hard-liners like Montgomery miss is that public service does not require rigid adherence to a personal ideological agenda. It requires an ability to remain flexible enough to respond to the people who elected you as their representative, not their emperor.

Failure to accept the fundamental message of the last election will eventually dilute Republican power at the state level as sure as it has at the national level. Voters want a change, not a restatement of the same old manifesto.