Randy Daniels, whose bid for the Republican nomination for governor has fallen into the shadows of better-financed and higher-profile opponents, is looking to rebound by positioning himself as a consensus candidate who can bridge the gap between the Republican and Conservative parties.

A small but growing group of Republican county leaders is pushing the candidacy of Mr. Daniels, a former New York secretary of state, in an effort to avert a political clash that the leaders say will make it virtually impossible for the party to defeat the presumptive Democratic nominee, Eliot Spitzer.

The Republican and Conservative parties are lining up behind opposing candidates and each party has threatened to go it alone in November for the first time in 16 years unless the other one backs down and switches its support.

The Republican state chairman wants to nominate William Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, while the head of the Conservative Party said yesterday that his party is backing a former Assembly minority leader from upstate New York, John Faso. Conservative Party leaders have rejected Mr. Weld’s candidacy largely because of his positions on social issues like abortion and gay marriage.

With each party entrenched in what some are calling a game of chicken, several Republican county leaders are pointing to Mr. Daniels’s candidacy as a way out of the deadlock.

“What are we going to do about winning the election? Where are we going to turn to have a viable chance to win this election? And a viable chance to win this election is coming up with a candidate that most people can agree on,” said Bob Smith, the Republican chairman of Onondaga County in central New York. “Randy Daniels could be a compromise consensus candidate because he’s not polarized on either side.”

Republicans are closer to splitting with the Conservatives in the governor’s race than at any time since the 1990 election, when Republicans nominated an obscure economist, Pierre Rinfret, and Conservatives backed Herbert London, a professor at New York University.

As is frequently noted, Republican statewide candidates have not won in New York without the endorsement of the Conservative Party since 1974. The number of New Yorkers registered in the party has declined to about 155,000, a small fraction of the Republican vote.

Republican state officials have signaled that support lost by not winning the Conservative Party endorsement could be regained through the backing of the Independence Party, which has yet to nominate a candidate in the race. The chairman of the Conservative Party, Michael Long, told The New York Sun yesterday that his party’s choice of Mr. Faso is “final” and predicted that Republicans would eventually come around to his side.

From the start, Mr. Daniels’s campaign has struggled to gain traction. Republican Party leaders have doubted his ability to raise enough money to compete with Mr. Spitzer, the state attorney general, and have questioned whether his base of support extends beyond New York City, where he lives. When Republican county leaders gathered in Albany in December to take part in a nonbinding straw poll of Republican candidates, Mr. Daniels picked up the support of just one chairman, while Messrs. Weld and Faso each picked up more than 20 counties.

Mr. Long said Mr. Daniels hasn’t “built any support within the ranks” of the party. He said Mr. Daniels is the party’s second choice, “far” behind Mr. Faso.

Mr. Daniels, who was put in charge of redeveloping 125th Street in Harlem while serving as a top official at the Empire State Development Corporation in the 1990s, has sought to counter claims about his viability by arguing that he’s the only Republican candidate who can “crack” New York City in the general election.

Mr. Smith was one of five Republican county chairmen who endorsed Mr. Daniels last month. The state committee of Madison County is expected to back Mr. Daniels this week, according to a Republican source. In a recent interview with the Sun, Mr. Daniels said the support from those counties rebuts claims that an African-American can’t compete in upstate New York.

The son of a haberdasher from Chicago’s South Side, Mr. Daniels started his political career as a Democrat but switched his party registration in the 1990s, joining the Pataki administration in 1995.

Along with his Republican opponents, Mr. Daniels has vowed to curb spending in Albany. He’s proposing a three-year spending freeze and has said that if legislators nevertheless increased the budget, he would “impound” the money. He has said Medicaid costs could be reduced by preventing middle-class New Yorkers from relying on it for long-term care. He proposes improving the state school system by lengthening the school day and year, by consolidating school districts, and by giving principals the power to fire teachers.

His position on abortion falls somewhere in between that of Mr. Weld’s and that of Mr. Faso’s. Mr. Weld is generally pro-choice, while Mr. Faso wants to restrict Medicaid’s funding of abortions.

All three Republican candidates trail Mr. Spitzer in the polls by roughly the same wide margin, a point that Mr. Daniels likes to note.

“Every time you do a head-to-head match-up with Spitzer and any of us,” he said, “there’s literally no difference” among the three. Therefore, he dismisses the idea that he is a lesser threat to Mr. Spitzer.