Two jowly men at the bar, watching the TV and hunched over what looked like or Scotch or another whiskey, also brushed me away. Dressed like lobbyists in expensive shirts and suspenders, they shook their heads emphatically: No, they did not want to talk. No, they would not say if they were Republican. No. Go away.

The scene was much the same in another part of town, at the Palm restaurant near Dupont Circle. Except here, at this famed hangout for political types, lobbyists and journalists, the patrons were more bipartisan. The Democrats were chatty. The Republicans — on learning that I was a reporter seeking reaction to the exit polls — fled. Literally.

“You might want to record that,” said a laughing Greg Schneiders, a Democrat and partner in a polling firm, when the three Republicans he was sitting with abruptly left the table upon my approach. “They ran for the hills!” Schneiders exclaimed.

Director of speechwriting in the Carter White House and a former press secretary to now-retired Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, Schneiders leaned back and pointed to a table that had been occupied when I came into the restaurant. It was also suddenly empty. “They left, too,” he said, chuckling about the quick exit of a group that had included former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf.

Every four years for the past 16 years, Schneiders has convened a bipartisan group of friends at the Palm to watch the presidential election results. By late afternoon, as the red wine flowed, the Democrats at his table were increasingly giddy. Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, said she was beginning to believe that Kerry might actually win. Ben Goddard, who owns an issue advocacy firm, said that the exit poll numbers reflected angst among young people, who were voting out of fear that George W. Bush’s policies would lead to a resurrection of the draft. “Talk to anyone in this restaurant, and they’ll say, ‘Impossible! There’s not going to be a draft.’ But that’s Washington for you. Go online and you’ll see a lot of people feel that there is,” Goddard said.

At that point, one of the stricken Republicans from Schneiders’ group returned. “I just had to use the bathroom!” the young man insisted. And he may have been telling the truth: 28-year-old Wen-Tsing Choi, who works at a polling firm, was the only Republican in the bar to give me his name. “Well, exit polls are not always right,” Choi said tentatively. “I’m still hoping. But some of those numbers are pretty wide.” Asked if he was surprised at how strong Kerry was appearing, Choi said, “A little bit surprised, yes.”

One of the other Republicans — a man everyone called Scott — bounded back to the table holding his Palm Pilot aloft. “Look what Drudge has! Those early numbers were based on a 59-41 [percent] female-male split! I knew it! How else would you get a 17 percent spread in New Hampshire [for Kerry], which is a bunch of crap.” But no one else seemed too excited about the conservative-leaning Drudge Report’s unsourced “scoop” that the exit polls were weighted toward women, who tend to support Democrats over Republicans. Scott shrugged. “Well, I’m must reading from Drudge,” he said.

For the second time, I asked if he’d give me his name and an interview. And once again, he just shook his head.

“A couple of days ago, I thought George Bush was more likely than not to be reelected, based on the public polling I had seen,” said Petrocik, who was a consultant to George H.W. Bush and is the author of the award-winning 1976 book “The Changing American Voter.” Now, he said, “I’m not sure any of us know.”

Petrocik said his doubt is driven by the methodology pollsters use to determine who is a likely voter — and thus who should be interviewed. “You can figure out who the nonvoters are, but you can’t easily figure out who the likely voters are. And so pollsters can wind up identifying a lot of people as voters who turn out not to be voters,” he said.

Poll respondents who don’t indicate by their answers that they are likely to vote are not interviewed further, and their opinions are not registered. But the questions and methods used to screen out the likely nonvoters are treated by most pollsters as inviolable trade secrets. “Pollsters generate a set of propositions about who is most likely to vote, and they develop an algorithm to decide who they want to interview. And they ask us to take it on faith” that they’ve done it right, Petrocik said. Moreover, “weighting” polls to account for voter preferences that a pollster doesn’t believe were adequately represented in a polling sample is another extremely subjective method, he said.

John Kerry partisans, meanwhile, should not invest too much hope in polls that show blocs of undecided voters in some battleground states, Petrocik warned. The conventional wisdom that undecided voters break for challengers because they represent change is not borne out by the data. “There’s no evidence of that at all,” Petrocik said. “In fact, the evidence that we have on that is 1) they [undecided voters] don’t vote; 2) if they vote, they split 50-50 between the candidates; or 3) if there’s a runaway candidate, they support the runaway.”

Thus, the polls are as difficult to follow this year as toddlers in a moon bounce. In Florida, for example, where 27 electoral votes are at stake, the numbers are on a roller coaster. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll has Kerry up by three points among likely voters, a Strategic Vision poll has Bush up by three, and a Zogby International survey has the race tied.

Petrocik said he is not privy to the daily tracking polls the Bush campaign is taking in battleground states. But he said that in a year marked by high passion, huge numbers of newly registered voters and intense get-out-the-vote efforts, the election is about turnout, not poll numbers.

“I have no prediction,” he said. “I can tell you different ways of doing it [crunching data] that show a Bush win. But do it another way, and it shows Kerry winning. I think the reasonable thing to say is that everyone promised us a close election, and we’ve gotten it.”

Colorado: The results of a Zogby International poll look good for Democratic state attorney general Ken Salazar, who leads Republican beer magnate Pete Coors, 52 to 44 percent. Factor in the 4.1 percent margin of error, though, and the outcome is still uncertain. Salazar appears to be feeling confident; he has been invoking John Kerry’s name in campaign appearances — trying to extend his coattails, it seems, to his party’s presidential ticket. Coors stumped today with Vice President Dick Cheney in the battleground state, their second joint appearance in nine days. A Salazar win would add a Senate seat for the Democrats. Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell is retiring.

Florida: A new CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll has the Democrat, former University of South Florida president Betty Castor, up 2 points over Karl Rove’s handpicked candidate, former Housing and Urban Development secretary Mel Martinez. But a poll by Republican firm Strategic Vision has Martinez up by 4. The most likely scenario is Zogby International’s analysis: dead even at 46 percent each, with 7 percent undecided. Castor campaigned Monday with John Edwards, retiring Democratic Sen. Bob Graham and singer Jimmy Buffett. After appearing at rallies on Sunday with President Bush, Martinez is campaigning Monday with Gov. Jeb Bush and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Kentucky: His campaign floundering, Republican Sen. Jim Bunning appeared briefly on Sunday with President Bush and Laura Bush as they headed for a rally in Cincinnati, in the neighboring battleground state of Ohio. Bush praised Bunning, and the 73-year-old senator again told reporters that rumors of his mental incompetence were malicious lies spread by his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Daniel Mongiardo. Bunning campaign spokesman David Young stressed the “Bush-Bunning team,” while new Democratic Party star Barack Obama stumped for Mongiardo, who has denounced attempts by Bunning’s surrogates in recent days to insinuate that he is gay. Illinois’ Obama is expected to sail to victory in his own Senate race on Tuesday — snatching a GOP seat for the Democrats.

Louisiana: The big question here is whether Republican Rep. David Vitter can pull at least 50 percent of the vote in the state’s all-party election and avoid a runoff. Until recently, he appeared headed for a straight-out victory on Tuesday. But pollster Verne Kennedy told the Lafayette Daily Advertiser Monday that an ad Vitter started running in north Louisiana implying that Democrats will let U.N. troops take over Louisiana elections appeared to have damaged the Republican, especially among women. The ad shows the lowering of the American flag as a rattled woman is escorted into a polling place. “Vitter has lost support in North Louisiana, and I understand that’s where the ad was run. I don’t know why [else] that would have happened,” Kennedy told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Chris John — battling for second place against fellow Democrat John Kennedy, the state treasurer — is gaining support among African-American voters. Kennedy angrily accused John of mailing a pamphlet to black voters calling him a segregationist.

North Carolina: The race to succeed Sen. Edwards remains a dead heat. The candidates are former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles, the Democrat, and Rep. Richard Burr, the Republican.

Oklahoma: Again, dueling polls have produced a murky picture in this conservative state, where Democrats believe they have an unusually good chance to pick up the Republican seat held by retiring Sen. Don Nickles. A survey by GOP firm Soonerpoll.com has former Republican Rep. Tom Coburn with 44 percent, compared with 35 percent for Democrat Brad Carson, a congressman. When the 4.4 percent margin of error is factored in, this poll has the race still up for grabs. CapAd Communications, a Democratic firm, has the race tied at 43 percent each. Coburn’s many gaffes have put the state in play for the Democrats. Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe demanded an investigation into what he called voter intimidation by the pro-Carson Cherokee Nation. Carson, a former Rhodes Scholar, is part Cherokee.

South Dakota: Knocking off Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle has been a top GOP priority. Former Republican Rep. John Thune has nipped uncomfortably close with an aggressive, pro-Bush campaign in the increasingly Republican state. But a flier he recently distributed in western South Dakota that seemed to equate Indians with “varmints” and “prairie dogs” has created a “groundswell of resentment” among the Native American population, the newspaper Indian Country Today reported.

This is the paradox for Tenenbaum, a soft-spoken former attorney and elementary school teacher who is about as conservative as a Democrat can be. She is for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. She supports the war in Iraq. And she is in favor of the death penalty. But the question is whether even that is enough to carry South Carolina, a veterans-heavy state in the heart of the religious conservative South that voted 57 percent for George W. Bush in 2000.

Polls indicate a slight advantage for Tenenbaum’s Republican opponent, U.S. Rep. Jim DeMint, who has squandered a once-commanding lead with blunder after blunder. After shaking up her campaign staff in August, Tenenbaum hoped to capitalize on DeMint’s missteps, including his assertion that gays and unmarried single mothers should not be allowed to teach in South Carolina’s public schools.

Pounding DeMint for his support of a 23 percent federal sales tax, she has pulled tantalizingly close in the polls, buoyed by $3 million in anti-DeMint ads paid for by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in Washington. “It’s a tight race, and it’s going to turn on who gets the vote out,” said Jack Bass, a professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston and coauthor of “The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945.” Predictions? “I wouldn’t make any,” Bass said.

In a state where some upscale gyms offer separate workout areas for women uncomfortable with sweating in front of men, Tenenbaum scores points with her polite and feminine manner. Slim and elegant at 53, her dark hair neatly coifed, she has not let DeMint’s television ads linking her to conservative bêtes noires Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., go unanswered. In a response ad, she looks into the camera, wrinkles her nose and says, “Ted Kennedy? Hillary Clinton? Can’t Jim DeMint do any better than that?”

At the same time, though, Tenenbaum has been running her own unsparing attack ads, pounding DeMint on what she calls his support for “disturbing” ideas, including free trade with China, which has cost South Carolina thousands of textile jobs, and privatizing part of Social Security. Between them, DeMint and Tenenbaum have been running one of the most negative and harsh campaigns in recent South Carolina memory.

In a recent debate, DeMint repeatedly invoked John Kerry’s name in an effort to tar Tenenbaum as a liberal. At the same time, the three-term congressman has tried to grab the president’s coattails, running effective television ads showing Bush heaping praise on him. Tenenbaum, trying to dodge the fatal L-word, has distanced herself from the Democratic ticket — she dropped in on the Democratic National Convention in Boston in August only briefly. “I’ll always take an independent approach,” she says in one of her television ads, “and I’ll never have any agenda other than what’s best for South Carolina.”

Meantime, she has downplayed her support of abortion rights, making no mention of it on her campaign Web site, aware that it puts her out of step in the Palmetto State. But the price of running a right-of-center campaign may be the Democratic-leaning African-American vote in a state where blacks are nearly 30 percent of the population.

“There’s not a great deal of enthusiasm for Tenenbaum in the black community because she’s running a centrist campaign,” said one close observer of South Carolina politics, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject. “It’s a delicate situation for her. Meanwhile, there’s a small portion of the black community that is more for Bush and for her opponent [DeMint] this year than you’d expect, because they’re both fundamentalist Christians, as are a lot of black voters.” The GOP has made inroads among religiously conservative blacks with its wedge-issue campaign against gay marriage, this observer added.

But DeMint received bad publicity from his joint appearance with Tenenbaum on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Oct. 17. Host Tim Russert pounded him about his statement that gays and unmarried mothers should not teach in public schools. It was the kind of intolerant position that could turn off a growing but not yet decisive population of non-native South Carolinians who have moved to the state in recent years — Northern retirees here for the mild weather and low housing prices and workers attracted to the Grand Strand tourist area around Myrtle Beach.

DeMint’s evasive answer to Russert — he apologized not for his statement but for “distracting” voters from the real issues — was panned by South Carolina’s premier political commentator. “The U.S. Senate race is Jim DeMint’s to lose,” Lee Bandy wrote in the State newspaper, adding: “DeMint seems to be doing all he can to lose it.” Bandy quoted Francis Marion University political scientist Neal Thigpen, a GOP activist, characterizing DeMint’s campaign as an “amateur hour.”

Still, the embarrassing DeMint may muddle through. A McLaughlin & Associates poll conducted Oct. 24-27 showed the Republican leading 46 percent to 38 percent, with a margin of error of 4.6 percent. The survey reinforced the results of a Mason-Dixon poll, conducted Oct. 19-20 for Charleston’s Post and Courier, that put DeMint at 47 percent and Tenenbaum at 43 percent, just within the margin of error, unusually close for conservative South Carolina.

If Vitter wins more than 50 percent of the vote in Louisiana’s unique multiparty open election on Tuesday, he will avoid a runoff and head directly to Washington. In a state where the other U.S. senator (Mary Landrieu) and the governor (Kathleen Blanco) are moderate, consensus-building Democratic women, the polarizing Vitter will become Louisiana’s GOP standard-bearer.

While many Republican politicians and operatives see Vitter as duplicitous, and many African-American leaders call him racist, Louisiana’s white conservative voters appear mostly beguiled. Based in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Vitter has won his last two congressional elections with more than 80 percent of the vote. He presents himself as a morally righteous, clean-cut family man, and his wife and three young children have become virtual campaign props. The Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar is also extremely intelligent, observers say, and runs perhaps the most effective political ads in the state. But there are hints of a dark side: allegations of an affair with a prostitute and a lawsuit claiming he lost his temper and physically charged at a woman at a town hall meeting.

Yet Vitter’s increasing popularity and power have caused his once-vocal critics to retreat. The situation today is in stark contrast to five years ago, when virtually the entire state Republican establishment lined up against the young state representative in his successful bid for the congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Bob Livingston, a Republican who was forced to retire after revelations about his extramarital affairs.

In 1999, none of Vitter’s future House colleagues showed up at his victory party, and few of his fellow state legislators did. “Vitter has such problems with people — not just fringe politicians, but legitimate, honest politicians in the legislature who just can’t stand him,” Republican lawyer Rob Couhig, one of the candidates Vitter defeated for Livingston’s congressional seat, told the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call at the time. But today Couhig wouldn’t dare repeat his earlier assertion. Like most other Louisiana Republicans, he now supports David Vitter.

There is one Republican who refuses to go quietly. He is a 78-year-old retired homebuilder from suburban New Orleans named John Treen, the brother of former Louisiana Gov. David Treen, a Republican whom Vitter defeated in the bitter 1999 congressional race. Saying he doesn’t “give a damn” what Vitter thinks of him, Treen said his motivation for speaking up is simple: “I don’t like liars.”

David Treen was a pioneer in the state GOP who represented Louisiana in the U.S. House in the 1970s. He declined to comment on Vitter, as did other Louisiana Republicans contacted for this article. “Everyone is scared,” John Treen told me. “You won’t find anyone willing at this point to stick their neck out. No one wants to cross Vitter, because he has grown too powerful.”

Vitter’s spokesman, Mac Abrams, did not return phone calls seeking comment. Undoubtedly, though, his boss would argue that his critics are merely angry that changing political preferences have swept them aside. Or he would say the clubby, often corrupt, political establishment in Louisiana resents his outsider status and reformer’s bent. “So many forces were against us. So many powers that be,” Vitter said in his 1999 victory speech. “They had the politicians. We had the people. They’ve had the past, but we are the future.”

Vitter grew up in a well-to-do family in New Orleans. After graduating from Harvard University, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship and earned a law degree from Tulane University in New Orleans. He served in the Louisiana House from 1991 to 1999. A Catholic, he lives in Metairie with his wife, Wendy, and three small children.

In the state House, Vitter earned a reputation as a grandstander. He was known for sneakily calling solo press conferences — sometimes just hours before his fellow Republicans had planned to make a joint announcement — in order to take credit for group initiatives that he would pass off as his own. “We’d be on the floor debating controversial bills and he’d be on the radio criticizing us,” one state Republican legislator, who declined to allow his name to be published, told me.

But Vitter also took on the state’s notorious corruption, earning him extensive coverage from the news media. In 1993, he helped expose officials who were awarding lucrative Tulane scholarships to members of their own families. Taking advantage of a perk that dated to the 1880s, the officials — including Livingston and Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, a Democrat — had bestowed on their families tens of thousands of dollars in tuition savings.

Also, in 1993, Vitter filed an ethics complaint against Democratic Gov. Edwin Edwards, which accused him of allowing his children to profit illegally from business with the state-regulated riverboat gambling industry. Edwards was later convicted in an extortion case involving riverboat gambling.

At the same time as he was racking up laudatory press coverage, though, Vitter was also getting a reputation in some quarters for a hot temper. At a Sept. 21, 1993, town hall meeting in Metairie, he got into a confrontation with a questioner that led to a lawsuit against him.

Mercedes Hernandez, who was involved in Republican politics, testified that she frequently attended local meetings to engage officials on the issues, usually tape-recording the events. At a town hall meeting, Hernandez asked the state representative about a rumor she’d heard that he was supporting a gay-rights bill in the Legislature. Vitter became “enraged by her question, left the podium where he was standing, advanced toward her in a rapid, threatening manner, pushing aside chairs … and grabbed a portable tape recorder” that Hernandez was holding, according to her legal complaint.

In his legal filings, Vitter denied that he had assaulted Hernandez and instead accused her of trying to set him up by planting the false idea with other attendees that he supported gay rights, a position that is anathema in his religious conservative district. He further accused Hernandez of working with John Treen and his other political enemies by trying to shop a story about the incident to the media.

After a trial, a judge awarded Hernandez $50. “The court finds that Mr. Vitter’s demeanor changed when he saw the tape recorder. He became angry, agitated and excited,” the judge wrote. “He thought Ms. Hernandez was using her question [about gay rights] as a ruse to ‘set him up’ and embarrass him.” But the judge also admonished Hernandez. “It appears that Ms. Hernandez was rather enjoying the political advantage she seemed to have perceived herself to have gained.” Hernandez, who is still active in Republican politics, did not return phone calls from Salon seeking comment.

By 1999, Vitter was ready to move to the national stage. His chance came when House Republicans lost seats in the 1998 midterm elections amid public anger over the impeachment of President Clinton. The election debacle caused angry House Republicans to reject Newt Gingrich, who resigned. His replacement as speaker was to be Livingston, then chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. But as the Louisiana Republican decried Clinton’s sexual transgressions, it emerged that he himself had engaged in extramarital affairs. Livingston too was forced to resign, paving the way for the 1999 special congressional election.

Livingston, Gov. Mike Foster, Rep. Billy Tauzin and other prominent Louisiana Republicans lined up to back David Treen, who even had the support of such Democrats as Sen. John Breaux. Then 70, Treen had served four terms in the U.S. House in the 1970s and became governor in 1979. His reputation was as a consensus builder who reached out to African-Americans. He was not an ally of the religious right. John Treen said, “My brother Dave has a reputation for absolute honesty and integrity. That was one of his trademarks.”

In the crowded open primary — a field that included David Duke — Treen and Vitter garnered the most votes and proceeded to a head-to-head runoff. In a meeting, they pledged to pull no dirty tricks, John Treen said.

To be sure, their campaign rhetoric was tough. Vitter attacked David Treen as an old-school politician. Treen replied that he was experienced. Treen supported restrictions on the sale of automatic and semiautomatic assault weapons; Vitter was against any form of gun control. Treen opposed racial quotas but supported allowing state colleges and universities to decide their own policies for boosting minority enrollment; Vitter was against any form of affirmative action. For most of the race, the better-known Treen led in the polls — until the last week, when Vitter violated his pledge not to play dirty, John Treen said.

The Vitter campaign sent fliers to black voters stating that the racist David Duke was supporting his opponent. In fact, Treen had been an enemy of Duke and had tried to stop his rise in Louisiana GOP politics. “Dave Treen and I have absolutely no use for David Duke whatsoever,” John Treen said. “He [Duke] tried to shake my hand once, and I said, ‘I’m not going to shake your hand, you son of a bitch.’ It’s hypocritical to shake someone’s hand if you consider them an enemy.” But in what John Treen believes was a secret pact between Duke and Vitter, the former Ku Klux Klansman came out publicly for his nemesis, Treen.

The effect was to suppress the black vote. Amid low turnout, Vitter eked out a victory with 51 percent. Curiously, though, the New Orleans area precincts that had supported Duke in the earlier phase of the race went not for Treen — whom the white supremacist had claimed to be supporting — but for Vitter. That was evidence, John Treen claims, that Duke’s supporters had secretly been rounding up votes for Vitter.

On election night, no members of Louisiana’s congressional delegation showed up to celebrate with their new colleague. Few members of the state House were there, either. Only one Republican of any consequence — U.S. Rep. Jim McCrery — called to congratulate Vitter.

In Congress, Vitter became a reliable vote for the extreme right, earning a 100 percent rating from the American Conservative Union in 2002. He vowed to outlaw abortion in almost all cases, even when pregnancy results from rape or incest; his only exception was to save the life of the mother. And — with an eye on the governor’s office — he continued the crusade against gambling that he’d started in 1993 with the ethics complaint against Gov. Edwin Edwards.

In 2002, Vitter criticized his fellow Republican, Gov. Mike Foster, for supporting the expansion of a casino operated near the Texas border by the Jena Band of Choctaws. Coming to Vitter’s aid was an advocacy group called the Committee Against Gambling Expansion, which mailed out campaign fliers on Vitter’s behalf and allowed Vitter to use its name in phone calls to supporters.

It turned out that the advocacy group was not run by “Louisiana folks with the Christian community,” as Vitter told the Times-Picayune he had initially thought. Rather, it was a sophisticated front group set up by a Washington lobbyist, who is now under federal investigation for his activities, on behalf of a rival tribe that was trying to block competition. Vitter has said he had no idea the Committee Against Gambling Expansion was actually representing casino interests.

As Vitter geared up in 2002 to run for governor, his bitter race against Treen came back to haunt him. A Treen supporter, local Republican Party official Vincent Bruno, blurted out on a radio show that he believed Vitter had once had an extramarital affair.

The Louisiana Weekly newspaper followed up. Bruno told the paper that the young woman had contacted the Treen campaign in 1999 because she was upset that Vitter was portraying himself as a family-values conservative and trotting out his wife and children for campaign photo ops. Bruno, who declined to comment for this story, and John Treen interviewed the woman, who said she had worked under the name “Leah.”

But after nearly a year of regular paid assignations with Vitter, the lawmaker asked her to divulge her real name, according to Treen, citing the account he said she gave him. Her name was Wendy Cortez, Treen said. She said Vitter’s response was electric. “He said, ‘Oh, my God! I can’t see you anymore,” John Treen told me, citing the woman’s account to him and noting that Vitter’s wife is also named Wendy. And Wendy Vitter does not appear to be the indulgent type.

Asked by an interviewer in 2000 whether she could forgive her husband if she learned he’d had an extramarital affair, as Hillary Clinton and Bob Livingston’s wife had done, Wendy Vitter told the Times-Picayune: “I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”

Vitter, Bruno and others interviewed the alleged prostitute several times in 1999. She also met with a respected local television reporter, Richard Angelico, the Louisiana Weekly said. But Angelico declined to run with the story after she would not agree to go on camera, the paper said. Vitter denied the allegations. But shortly before the Louisiana Weekly was set to publish its story, he dropped out of the governor’s race, saying he needed to deal with marital problems. “Our [marriage] counseling sessions have … led us to the rather obvious conclusion that it’s not time to run for governor,” Vitter said at the time.

Chris Tidmore, the author of the Louisiana Weekly story, said he interviewed the alleged prostitute by telephone and reviewed the notes of her sessions with Treen and Bruno before publishing his story. He said she had moved away from New Orleans and is now living under an assumed name. Salon could not locate her.

Amid Vitter’s denials and the reluctance of his accuser to go public, no newspapers in Louisiana reported on the allegations. And, when Sen. Breaux announced his retirement last December, Vitter jumped into the race to succeed the conservative Democrat. The far-right and confrontational Vitter was the opposite of Breaux, who had been a consensus-builder in Washington with close relationships with Republicans.

Vitter was also deeply unpopular in the black community. In February a group of black clergy went so far as to accuse Vitter of orchestrating a federal corruption probe into people associated with New Orleans’ black former mayor, Marc Morial. Vitter had helped secure federal funding for the task force that was investigating the Morial circle.

After the task force raided the home of the former mayor’s brother Jacques, Morial’s attorney said sarcastically that he was surprised Vitter hadn’t been riding along with the agents. “Congressman Vitter is running for the Senate,” Pat Fanning told the Times-Picayune. “You’ve got a Republican conservative white base, and you went and got money to go and investigate black people in New Orleans.”

Vitter denied that he had targeted the Morial family and asked the Greater New Orleans Coalition of Ministers, a group of black clergy that had complained about his motives, to meet with him. Instead, the ministers denounced Vitter’s “political ploys,” saying they would not participate in a “media event designed to deceive our congregations.” Although more than 30 percent of the population in Louisiana is African-American, Vitter appears to have written them off. And if the polls are correct, he doesn’t need black voters; he can win on the strength of conservative whites alone in a state that gave its nine electoral votes to George W. Bush in 2000.

Indeed, Vitter has a strong lead in the open-party race. He is the only Republican, and he’s running against three Democrats — state treasurer John Kennedy, U.S. Rep. Chris John, and state Rep. Arthur Morrell. With Democratic votes divided, Vitter may win outright. A Verne Kennedy poll, conducted Oct. 22 and 23, found Vitter pulling 51 percent, enough to avoid a runoff. The poll showed Vitter with only 6 percent of the black vote.

This week, the Lafayette Daily Advertiser declined to endorse any of the Senate candidates, saying they “have shown no indication that they will continue the bipartisan approach that has been so important to Louisiana and the nation.” Newt Gingrich would be proud.