Campaign 2002: five hot Senate races.

Nothing raises the stakes for voting like the prospect of a shift in partisan power. So November 5, 2002 has been circled in red on political calendars since the 2000 elections left the U.S. Senate split down the middle, 50 to 50.

President George W. Bush's election gave Vice President Richard B. Cheney the tie-breaking power that kept the Senate in GOP hands, barely. Then Vermont Republican James M. Jeffords switched to independent status, restoring the Democrats to power. Each party has had a long year to experience the sharp difference between minority and majority status and has redoubled efforts to secure the latter.

With most analysts seeing no distinct advantage to either party in this year's 34 Senate races, here's a look at five of the most interesting races.

SOUTH DAKOTA 

To a handful of citizens in the far reaches of the rural Midwest, voting to keep Democrats in charge of the U.S. might rank as their secondary civic duty of the day.

So goes one scenario for the climax of South Dakota's pivotal Senate race: Tribal elections--which happen to fall on Nov. 5--boost turnout of a key Democratic-leaning constituency, Native Americans. "They cast their vote for chief. Then they walk across the room and cast their vote to keep Tim Johnson in the Senate," says Jennifer Duffy, who tracks Senate races for the Cook Political Report.

"This is how close it is in South Dakota. The race is going to be decided by a few thousand votes. Both campaigns know who they are and they have invited them to dinner," quips Duffy.

Of course, Rep. John Thune can float equally plausible visions of how he exploits South Dakota's heavy Republican predisposition, topples incumbent Johnson, and snatches back majority control of the Senate for the GOP.

That explains the emergence of Johnson and Thune--relative unknowns on the national scene--at center stage in this year's marquee political drama. Jostling in the wings are President Bush, who carried the state by 22 percent in 2000, and South Dakota's own Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority leader, who may himself run for president in 2004.

"Johnson and Thune are two very well-known, very well-matched statewide political figures," says Stuart Rothenberg, another independent campaign-watcher in Washington. "Both are articulate, both are smart, both are good-looking, both are successful at getting votes."

Both are unabashed professional politicians. Thune, 41, has been a staffer to former Republican Sen.

Jim Abdnor (knocked off in 1986 by Daschle, a rising congressman at the time, like Thune today), a lobbyist and a state GOP official. Thune is a reliable, conservative supporter of President Bush--voting in the House this year, for example, to make the administration's tax cuts permanent while Daschle blocks Senate action on the issue. His committee assignments give him decent jurisdiction over agricultural, transportation and public works issues important to the small state.

Thune's greatest advantage over the other ambitious House members is peculiar to a few tiny states. He has run statewide and won three times, as South Dakota's sole, at-large congressman, so he is very well-known to voters.

Johnson, 55, served eight years in the South Dakota legislature, and won Daschle's open House seat in 1986. After five terms, he again followed his mentor's example, defeating a vulnerable Senate veteran, Republican Larry Pressler, in 1986.

Johnson, too, has enjoyed good committee assignments for South Dakota, including a plum slot on the Appropriations Committee, thanks to Daschle and Senate Democrats who want to ensure his prosperity.

Meanwhile, the President has put his prestige on the line. His political staff helped persuade Thune to take on this challenge, rather than the easier run for an open governor's seat. Bush traveled to South Dakota in the spring, telling GOP contributors bluntly, "I'm here because I want John Thune to become the next U.S. senator."

But that's not why South Dakota '02 appears destined for one of those well-thumbed handbooks on the applied science of politics. After the President, cabinet members and bignanie national Democrats have passed through South Dakota--national media in tow--"this is going to come down to something as boring as the mechanics of voter identification and turnout," says Duffy.

It's enough to fire up political fans from Washington to Pierre and points between.

MINNESOTA

Arms flailing, voice cracking, sweat beads breaking between the corkscrew curls on his pate, Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone puts on a demonstration of why some people would gladly march with him to blazes and back.

For this particular seminar on a sweltering June afternoon, the onetime college professor dons a bright yellow message T-shirt ("Mental Health Parity Now!") and takes a microphone, the gleaming Capitol at his back. He invokes the plight of the sickest, most frightened people willfully neglected, he suggests, by an unfeeling industry: "Men and women with urine-drenched clothing that they wear day after day!"

The issue-forcing insurance companies to cover mental health as well as they cover physical ailments--is vintage Wellstone: The oppressed little guy against the powerful array of monied interests. Now President Bush has joined the issue, Welistone notes, and this year mental health parity might just become law.

Inside of two minutes, Welistone has roused a sleepy crowd of activists to shouts and cheers.

But back in Minnesota, if pollsters' cold calculations are correct, Wellstone's heat and passion are not playing well enough to keep him in office. It's not just the GOP's charge that he stands to the left of Minnesota's mainstream-possibly true, but hardly fatal to a good politician. Rather, it is that Paul Welistone was the anti-politician. Now he seeks a third Senate term in violation of a promise to step down after two. He solicits cash from political action committees that he once foreswore-for a race likely to smash Minnesota spending records.

Thus Republicans hope Welistone-- so liberal that he chafed publicly at Sen. Ted Kennedy's partnership with Bush on public school reform last Year--has boxed himself into an insoluble dilemma.

In Norm Coleman, a onetime Democrat and former mayor of Democratic-leaning St. Paul, Republicans think they have the kind of practical, moderate figure who can exploit Wellstone's weakness.

Coleman, who comes from Queens and started in politics as a New York campus activist, generally opposes abortion and supports gun-owners rights, facts Wellstone is likely to use as evidence of excessive conservatism. But Coleman made his name as a business- and service-oriented mayor who helped woo a professional hockey team back to the city after a long hockey drought.

Coleman ran and lost a lackluster campaign for governor in 1998, the year that independent Jesse Ventura won. But Carleton College political scientist Steven W. Schier says Coleman learned some lessons and won some statewide recognition along the way.

"He has fewer sharp edges than Paul Wellstone," says Schier, possibly an advantage at a moment when voters want stability and are heartened by President Bush's steadiness in wartime. Bush narrowly lost Minnesota in 2000, but is popular there today.

Still, Schier and others warn against discounting Wellstone, the sweaty, shouting campaigner, who has twice won election to the Senate with barely 50 percent of the vote.

MAINE

A handful of voters on an island in Penobscot Bay face a rare ballot offering in November. They can vote to send former state Senate Majority Leader Chellie Pingree to the U.S. Senate. And, going down the ballot, they can choose her daughter, fellow Democrat Hannah / Pingree, over the Republican woman seeking the local seat in the state House of Representatives.

But it will take more than mother-daughter ballot synergy to topple the woman at the top of the ticket, incumbent Sen. Susan M. Collins, whose model is the matriarch of modern Maine politics, the late Sen. Margaret Chase Smith.

"It's no accident," says Collins, that both senators from Maine are female. "Margaret Chase Smithwas in the Senate the entire time that I was growing up." Serving in the Senate from 1949 to 1972, Smith "paved the way for Olympia and me," Collins says, referring to the senior senator, Olympia J. Snowe. Smith's bequest was a cheerful statewide habit of voting for a woman, which meant that sexual prejudice was much less of a barrier for Snowe and Collins than for their sisters seeking high office in states with no history of powerful females.

Collins, 49, is quick to claim an-other Smith legacy that may be her greatest asset in this campaign: a Maine Republican's flinty independence from rote political partisanship. "It's no coincidence," that all three women senators from Maine have been from the GOP, asserts Collins, because Maine Republicans have traditionally worked across party lines. In recent years, that has often meant defiance of the national party's increasingly conservative leadership.

For Collins it has meant, for example, supporting abortion rights and campaign finance reform, while opposing President Clinton's impeachment and, more recently, the Bush administration's push for oil drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Collins follows in the footsteps of another popular moderate from Maine, her predecessor and former boss, former Sen. William S. Cohen, who started his career as the rare House Republican favoring impeachment of his party's President Richard M. Nixon, and finished it as Defense Secretary to Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Collins, bred in a political family from Aroostook County, started her career as an intern and, eventually, an influential staffer to Cohen. Back home, she did stints in state and federal government and business and, in 1994, ran a poor third for governor.

But she handily beat a more experienced Democrat for Cohen's seat in 1996 and has since compiled the record of a textbook GOP moderate from New England: Generally conservative on fiscal issues, liberal on social questions.

Collins sits on the Armed Services Committee, a good platform from which to promote such crucial local interests as Bath Iron Works, a venerable shipyard for high-technology destroyers. Her work on Bush's public school reform bill last year brings her support from teachers.

With about $2 million in the bank after this year's first-quarter reporting period, Collins's fundraising has been ample by national standards, extraordinary by Maine's.

Collins's down-the-middle appeal reflects reality down East. Maine's proportion of declared independents--about 38 percent--"probably represents the strongest nonparty tradition in the country," says Anthony Corrado of Colby College. The GOP holds a narrow advantage over the Democrats in party registration for the rest of Maine's voters.

Corrado says it's an open question "whether having a woman oppose Collins will help to eliminate the possible advantage of Collins's appeal to female voters."

Contributors nationwide have been answering that question with their pocketbooks: Yes to Democrat Pingree, to a lively tune of $1.7 million by April. Pingree, 47, finds the female cast of the campaign in keeping with traditions far older than Margaret Chase Smith's election. "I don't know if it goes back to seafaring days when the men were gone and the women had to do," says Pingree, who hails from a bay island 12 miles from the mainland.

Pingree is long accustomed to "doing," as town clerk, as local school board chairman, as a small businesswoman and as the state's first female Senate majority leader--from a traditionally Republican district.

Campaign finance expert Corrado, surmises, incidentally, that the plenitude of women in Maine politics is related to the state's pioneering public campaign finance law for state office candidates.

But Corrado also notes that federal candidate Pingree has already spent the lion's share of her campaign fund, partly on early television ads. For Pingree that gamble was always "part of the plan," to get herself known by touting her role in enactment of "Maine Rx," the state's prescription drug program.

Pingree predicts a harvest of rising poll numbers from the ads and more national fundraising success that will breed momentum. "This is doable," she said of her uphill campaign.

MISSOURI

Poll results have been muddy, but overall they paint a tough, close race between Jean Carnahan and Jim Talent, the top-flight candidate the GOP has recruited to oppose her. Eight-year House veteran Talent was the Republican nominee to replace Mel Carnahan as governor in 2000. Talent barely lost, with sympathy for the late Governor and his widow plainly a factor.

"People forget Mel Carnahan was losing to John Ashcroft by 5 or 10 points when he died," says campaign expert Duffy, who expects that two years' after the tragedy voters will be inclined to take a fresh look at Talent and a harder one at Carnahan.

Talent, a 45-year-old lawyer from suburban St. Louis, is socially conservative--generally opposed to gun control and to abortion--but he devoted his energies as a legislator more to business and defense issues.

Money has been pouring into this campaign for months. An array of presidential aides and cabinet members have visited to help shore up GOP strength in a swing state that third-party candidate Ralph Nader helped Bush win.

Running in her first political race, Democratic Sen. Jean Carnahan, 69, is writing the sequel to one of the strangest episodes in recent political memory. Her husband, Gov. Mel Carnahan, died with their son in a campaign plane crash about three weeks before Election Day 2000. Mel Carnahan still defeated incumbent Republican John Asheroft, and Jean Carnahan was appointed to the seat, while Ashcroft became President Bush's attorney general.

Missouri law requires Carnahan to run in a special election for the four remaining years in the Senate term. Not only does her party's continued control of the Senate depend on Carnahan and a handful of other candidates, Bush and a battery of his would-be Democratic opponents are working Missouri like the Presidential battleground it will be in 2004.

More than any senator on the ballot this year, Carnahan's fate hangs on a question that is a mystery to even her strongest supporters: Is she up for the rigors of a long, merciless campaign in what, politically, is one of the nation's most crucial states?

Carnahan has to show that she is "a senator in her own right-not just the wife of a dead, would-be senator," bluntly assesses John Petracik, political science department chairman at the University of Missouri.

Majority Leader Daschle and other Democrats have made sure to give Carnahan opportunities to show her stuff. She had a role, for example, in fashioning the airport security bill that the Senate passed after last year's terrorist attacks.

Carnahan touts a suitably moderate Senate voting record for middle-of-the-road Missouri, including support for the Bush tax cuts. And, she may profit from the slight Democratic tilt of the gender gap. "And she's the incumbent. That's worth something," says Petracik.

TEXAS

This year's Democratic hope for a historic upset in Bush country was to be found in a most improbable setting one late-May afternoon: in the dark-wood-and-marble confines of Washington's Old Ebbitt Grill, wooing members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Chamber-sanctioned "meet-and-greet" is a hallowed Washington ritual for Senate candidates plying the fundraising circuit. But only the rare Democrat need bother to apply.

Such a Democrat is Ron Kirk, 48, a business-friendly former two-term mayor of Dallas, where business-friendliness is a prerequisite for political success. It is that credential--not his shot at becoming the South's first black Senator since Reconstruction--that gives some Republicans pause.

"Ron Kirk is a very good Democratic candidate for Texas," says campaign analyst Stuart Rothenberg. He is smart, well-known in the state's biggest media market and more than acceptable to business and to whites (who gave him an ample majority for reelection in 1997).

The son of a postal clerk and a teacher, Kirk has broad political experience, from the Washington staff of former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen to Texas secretary of state.

Even with no incumbent to face, such assets might still come up short in Texas, where Republicans hold all of the more than 25 statewide offices and former Governor Bush is extremely popular. Kirk's prospects are tied to what Democrats call "the dream ticket" that he shares with gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez, a rich businessman, and John Sharp, the white candidate for lieutenant governor.

"They have a kind of 'Perfect Storm' scenario," says Rothenberg, eliciting big money and multi-ethnic excitement to expand Democratic turnout to carry the day in this non-presidential year, when low turnouts are the norm.

Adding to the race's complexity is an imponderable that can't be measured in polls because voters won't admit to it. University of Texas political scientist Bruce Buchanan notes, "Will there be an element of covert racism" that increases the turnout of some whites to vote against Kirk?

In any event, says Buchanan, both sides face a delicate balancing act. Kirk must maximize minority turnout "without seeming particularly liberal or particularly identified with an African-American agenda."

The Republican candidate, Attorney General John Cornyn, cannot be seen as "playing the race or ethnic cards," Buchanan says. Doing so seems unlikely for the silver-haired, 50-year-old former judge.

"He's a very capable guy, with a strong. record as attorney general and... on the state Supreme Court," says Buchanan. "He is not a radical conservative but a business conservative, which has great appeal here." In fact, Cornyn also requested a Chamber of Commerce meet-and-greet in Washington. Kirk can expect to have high-level support from Democrats gleeful over the mere possibility of embarrassing Bush in his home state. But as Buchanan says, "He won't have the President of the United States come in to campaign for him."

John E. Mulligan is Washington Bureau chief of the Providence Journal.