Senate Democratic leaders are pressuring Republicans with tough election contests to help them suspend the debate over gas prices long enough to let them produce results on a lot of other topics.

The majority wants quick action on a roughly 400-page megabill made up of three dozen unrelated bills, most of which have been blocked by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn.

With the election months away, Majority Leader Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders included bills that have a local impact for a variety of rank-and-file Republican colleagues who are on the ballot. Many of the Senate’s most vulnerable Republicans — Minnesota’s Norm Coleman, Maine’s Susan Collins, Oregon’s Gordon H. Smith, New Hampshire’s John E. Sununu and Alaska’s Ted Stevens — have cosponsored several bills in the package.

Stevens, for example, is the lead sponsor of a proposal (S 39) to establish a national ocean exploration program to search for new life forms or sources of minerals, an important issue for his home state. It’s now a segment of the larger package.

Coleman is the lead sponsor of a measure (S 840) to aid torture victims and authorize grants to torture treatment centers — a significant bill in a state that takes pride in the way it has welcomed war refugees. The Minneapolis-based Center for Victims of Torture is one of the nation’s top treatment centers for torture survivors.

Coleman said July 22 that he was torn over how to vote on the package.

Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., said Democratic leaders were optimistic that enough Republicans would be swayed by the popularity of the omnibus bill’s components to allow it to pass.

“If you want to oppose this package, you’re opposing a lot of things, including things that most Americans believe overwhelmingly should be part of our law — to protect against child pornography, to deal with the drug problem in our country, to try to find runaway children, to prosecute those who are guilty of civil rights crimes,” Durbin said.

It would be easy for an opponent to make campaign use of a vote against any of those elements — a point that Durbin was sure to underscore.

“If you want to cast your vote against it, I’m sure there will be many people at home with a lot of questions,” he said.

Reid, D-Nev., and the other leaders also made sure the package could offer some traction to the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

It includes Obama-backed proposals to protect children from Internet predators (S 1738), to help prosecute unsolved civil rights crimes (S 535), to increase research on postpartum depression (S1375), to increase paralysis research (S 1183), to expand broadband Internet access (S 1492) and to establish a study-abroad program named in honor of former Illinois Democratic Sen. Paul Simon (S 991).

Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, has signed on to just one of the bills folded into that package: a Reid proposal, which has the backing of more than three-fourths of the Senate, to create a registry of those suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Durbin downplayed the notion that his fellow Illinois senator’s cosponsorship made a difference in the construction of the package.

“Each of the [committee] chairmen chose the bills,” Durbin said. “That was left to them.”

And though Durbin has often talked about being in frequent contact with Obama out on the campaign trail, he said he had not spoken to Obama about the multibill package.

On Wednesday, Democrats held a press conference to push for passage of the unsolved civil rights crimes legislation, which counts among its cosponsors two members of the Republican leadership team who are seeking re-election this year: GOP Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Vice Chairman John Cornyn of Texas.

Coburn said he remained optimistic that he would garner the votes from his Republican colleagues to defeat the package — perhaps by sticking with him on a procedural vote, such as cloture on a motion to proceed.

A GOP leadership aide agreed with that assessment.

“I don’t think Senate Republicans will give Reid 60 votes to proceed to anything, Coburn or otherwise, until we do something meaningful about gas prices,” one aide said.

Some GOP senators up for re-election this year have made the calculation that gas prices will resonate more with voters than any other issue and say they plan to oppose any effort to move away from the issue.

“I suspect we’re going to be on energy for awhile,” said Georgia’s Saxby Chambliss, who is favored to win re-election this year. “Folks back home in Georgia care about gas prices. That’s what they want us working on.”

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, RKy., is expected to oppose changing the Senate’s pending business from the gas price debate to the combination package, which Reid could call up as soon as Thursday.