Late last winter, Edward Cox wrote a personal check to himself for $150,000 and quietly began his campaign against Senator Clinton. He used the money to rent an Albany office, hire staff, commission polls, and test the waters against a popular incumbent who also happens to be one of the most visible people on earth. An early sign the loan would pay dividends came a few weeks later as the Republican pollster who advised calm when President Bush looked doomed early on Election Day last year urged Mr. Cox to get into the race.

Since then, Mr. Cox has continued to listen to Fred Steeper. He has brought on a former Bush administration official as his communications director and retained a marketing company founded by Karl Rove. He has hired a fund-raising outfit that played a central role in the Republican congressional and White House victories last year and named an exploratory committee heavy with Washington insiders. Mr. Cox has also raised $675,000 from contributors and loaned himself another $425,000, according to Federal Election Commission records filed last week.

One thing Mr. Cox has tried not to do over the last six months: listen to the chairman of New York’s Republican State Committee, Stephen Minarik.

The Cox camp, of course, will not openly admit as much. But relations between the state party and Mr. Cox have been famously chilly ever since Mr. Minarik decided to make an open secret of his preference for Jeanine Pirro in next year’s race against Mrs. Clinton by joining more than three dozen Republican county chairmen in urging Mrs. Pirro in an open letter to run. Mr. Cox and another Republican aspirant for U.S. Senate, John Spencer, were outraged at the letter.

The conflict between Mr. Cox and Mr. Minarik is not personal. The two are said to get along personally. Their dispute reflects instead a difference of opinion over the direction of the Republican Party in New York. One camp, which includes Mr. Minarik and a former Pataki official who is now advising Mrs. Pirro, Kieran Mahoney, appears to think nominees for statewide office do not need strong conservative credentials to win. The other camp, embodied by Mr. Cox and his Beltway-heavy advisers, thinks the future of the Republican Party here depends on putting strong conservatives forward.

This internal debate is thought to be one of the reasons Mrs. Pirro has remained silent on whether she will run for U.S. Senate or state attorney general next year. The chairman of the state Conservative Party, Michael Long, told The New York Sun that “life will be a lot more difficult” for Mrs. Pirro if she goes against Mr. Cox for his party’s nomination. That may not be a fight the self-described fighter Mrs. Pirro wants to wage if an easier race beckons.

Meanwhile, the Cox campaign is busy implementing a strategy aimed at shoring up the Conservative Party line and demonstrating it can raise the tens of millions of dollars it will need to battle Mrs. Clinton. Advisers concede that the fund-raising results have not been impressive so far, but say efforts right now are centered on slowly building the kind of loyal base that made Mr. Rove a household name – and Mr. Bush a two-term president – after last year’s elections.

“Mr. Cox is committed to bringing the lessons that we’ve learned on the national level here to New York to run a very aggressive campaign against Mrs. Clinton,” Thomas Basile, a spokesman for Mr. Cox, said. “And we have been very grateful to folks in Washington who continue to have a constructive dialogue with us about strategy and issues.”

It won’t be easy. Five days after Mr. Cox filed his first quarterly report, a Siena Research Institute poll showed Mrs. Clinton’s popularity at 60%. More damaging was the fact that pollsters included Mrs. Pirro as the only potential opponent of Mrs. Clinton in next year’s race. The poll’s director, Joseph Caruso, said the exclusion of Mr. Cox was not deliberate, but a Republican insider said the omission was telling: “That’s the problem Ed Cox is going to have,” the source said of the Manhattan lawyer’s name recognition.

Still, Mr. Basile predicted his candidate will have the same kind of success in New York by following the lead of Washington insiders that Republicans outside the state have had in recent years. Mr. Bush surprised virtually everyone last week when he chose a white male to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court that even critics of identity politics assumed was reserved for a woman. Mr. Basile said state Republicans will be similarly shocked if they allow those who advised Mr. Bush on that decision and others to take the lead against Mrs. Clinton.

“Everyone thought this race was going to be about gender and a catfight,” Mr. Basile said. “But if you’re going to win against Mrs. Clinton, it’s not going to be about gender and personalities. It’s going to be about issues.”