Blood in the water in North Carolina

The Senate race might not wind up being as close as the presidential one. Even rock-ribbed Republican voters said they were giving up on Dole. "I don't like the other one either, but I don't have much choice," said Joe Langley, 71, a retiree from Stoneville and a lifelong Republican who's voting for McCain and -- even though he doesn't like her so much -- Hagan. "I'm giving her a shot ... [Dole]'s No. 93 on getting things accomplished." Langley was actually quoting a Hagan ad paid for the by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; if Hagan wins, she may owe more to DSCC chairman Chuck Schumer than to her own efforts.

Which isn't to say she's not working hard. Hagan zipped around the state all weekend, bouncing from the North Carolina A&T University homecoming parade in Greensboro (the area she represents in the state Senate) to a fair in Winston-Salem to a barbecue in Morganton before winding up at the same NASCAR race as Liddy Dole and Cindy McCain. Still, it wasn't until the last few weeks that she started pulling ahead. "I think people are understanding the fact that Liddy Dole has voted over 92 percent of the time with George W. Bush," Hagan said. "People realize that she's not representing people here in North Carolina." The presidential campaign is helping her, too. "We haven't had presidential advertisements in North Carolina since Jimmy Carter," she said. Rep. Watt said Obama's turnout machine could be what puts Hagan in office.

As for the incumbent, Dole seems to be running a much more somnambulant campaign. She dodged five proposed debates, passive-aggressively failing to commit to them rather than outright refusing. Voters are seeing her on her terms, not theirs -- her campaign Web site doesn't have a public calendar of events, and her Senate calendar is three and a half years out of date. While she was at the race Saturday, aides limited her to banal small talk with Salon -- after she spoke with a local Associated Press reporter at the NASCAR media center, they hustled her off to the suites to mingle with the race's sponsors and other donor types and said she'd try to call me later, which she didn't. (They blamed the AP guy for taking too much of her time, but he said they actually gave him 10 minutes less than they promised him.)

Even at the race, though, Dole wasn't as visible as Cindy McCain (even if she was nicely outfitted in a Bank of America 500 warm-up jacket). While McCain toured the pits and schmoozed with fans, Dole hung back and prayed with drivers before the race started. (There was a lot of prayer. "Thank you for allowing us to live in the greatest country on the face of the earth," went the prayer read over the P.A. system just before the engines started. "We thank you for what you did 2,000 years ago on Calvary's cross.") But really, NASCAR races aren't great for actually doing much retail campaigning; many of the people there aren't in the best state of mind to discuss the election. Like the guy with an alarmingly large pile of beer cans next to him who told me he'd learned on the Internet that Obama is a Muslim, born in Cairo and not a U.S. citizen, whose secret other middle name besides Hussein is -- yes, you guessed it -- Mohammed. He won't be voting, though, because the shadowy Bilderberg Group controls Congress, and Congress controls the president. His two friends sitting nearby, who seemed content to let him pull their weight when it came to drinking, will be voting for McCain, but feared Obama would win.

This is still North Carolina, after all, and race will still probably play a part in how the presidential election finishes here. "I don't think the United States is ready for a black person to be president," said Lucille Anderson, 73, from Lawsonville. "I think the blacks would be mean to us ... they'd probably take us over." But sitting across the picnic table from her at the Dixie Classic Fair in Winston-Salem Saturday, Anderson's daughter, Cathy Grantham, said the economy was too miserable to worry about race. "We need a change," said Grantham, 50, who works for a wealthy family near Winston-Salem and voted for Bush in 2000, the last time she bothered with Election Day. "I'm looking past color this year ... When he speaks, I think Obama thinks about what he's gonna say; he don't just blurt anything out [like McCain]." Some black North Carolinians, meanwhile, are a little skeptical of the polls. "People are trying to see what the white citizens -- what if they get behind the poll and close the curtains, I mean they say they're gonna vote for Obama, but what happens when they're actually in the poll?" said Raquel Edwards, 39, who works in accounting for a welding company in Greensboro, while she watched the North Carolina A&T parade. Watt didn't sound concerned about hidden racism affecting the vote. "Race is still a factor in some parts and in some minds, but you know, lots of things have changed," he said. "We don't need to change every one of them, but if we can change some of them, that's important."

For now, Republicans aren't panicking about McCain. Dole may be in serious trouble, but McCain may turn things around here, and the GOP could win the governor's race for the first time in years. "What's taken place up to now is a good wakeup call for Republicans," said Shumaker, Burr's consultant. But optimism has its limits, even in a state that has been as good to Republicans as North Carolina. Something needs to stop Obama's momentum here, or else there could be a landslide in the making. "Two weeks from today, if the same trend lines are in place, it'll be a very bad sign for all Republicans," Shumaker said.