GOP duel: the primaries get underway, dominated by two men.

THE race for the White House in 2008 was going to be different. For the first time since 1952, neither a sitting president nor a vice president would be on the ballot. With no candidate enjoying the advantages of incumbency, there would be no frontrunner.

That's how it was supposed to go.

But on the Republican side of the contest, the upcoming campaign increasingly appears to be dominated by just two men, Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Arizona senator John McCain. Though neither has officially declared his candidacy, the Mormon and the Maverick stand apart in their organizational strength heading into the "invisible primary" of 2007. No other candidate has come close to putting together the team of activists, operatives, consultants, and donors that Romney and McCain already have in place.

Romney and McCain are especially strong in the handful of small states that have early presidential primaries and therefore tend to decide presidential nominations. As early as this spring, both campaigns signed up key operatives to work in these states. Then Election Day came, and two things happened in short order to winnow the field. First, Virginia senator George Allen lost his reelection contest and was thus knocked out of contention for the presidency. A few weeks later, outgoing Senate majority leader Bill Frist took himself out of the running. Though neither, at least by the time he left the race, was thought as formidable as the two front-runners, each had worked the donor-and-activist base of the party almost since President Bush's reelection in 2004. With Allen and Frist gone, McCain and Romney were left as the only candidates who were both clearly running and in the top tier of GOP presidential hopefuls. And only they had begun putting together the apparatus needed to survive the primaries that have largely decided every GOP nomination for the past quarter century.

"I had little or no interest in Senator McCain, but got a call from Terry Nelson," recalls Dave Roederer, President Bush's Iowa chairman in 2004 and an experienced GOP operative. Nelson, an Iowa native and top Bush-Cheney '04 official who will run McCain's national campaign, told Roederer that if he didn't want to see McCain, he, Nelson, would be happy to convey that message to the senator. Roederer, friendly Midwesterner that he is, didn't want to offend McCain, and agreed to the meeting. He came away impressed.

While other candidates who came courting offered "platitudinous stuff on international affairs," McCain knew the field cold, Roederer says. What's more, "even when it wasn't popular, McCain said the president is right on Iraq." This position on the war is why Roederer, though a good party man, will serve in the same capacity for the maverick McCain as he did for Bush.

The Arizonan's team seems to recognize the strength of their chief opponent in the state this time around. "Romney's put a lot of effort into Iowa" and "has got a pretty good structure in place," acknowledges one of McCain's top national strategists. Success in the Hawkeye State for McCain, says this adviser, would be just to "come out of there with one of the tickets" into New Hampshire.

Romney's cultivation of Iowa Republicans has been intense. He visited the state twelve times before Election Day this year, and in June he rolled out a list of some 50 Republicans who form his "Iowa Advisory Committee." "We're working county by county and precinct by precinct, and that's the sign of how serious you are," boasts Doug Gross, Romney's state chairman and a Des Moines lawyer who was his party's gubernatorial standard-bearer in 2002. "It's a grassroots effort that wins the caucuses. You can't come in and do a tarmac effort and win."

To Gross, Romney's distance from the Iraq issue and lack of national-security experience is a plus. "He's a smart guy who can look at foreign-policy issues with a fresh perspective," Gross says, while McCain is hampered by his "years in Washington." Gross engages in the same kind of expectation-setting as the McCain strategist, saying that if Romney were to come out of the caucuses "ahead of the frontrunner" that would be "a huge deal." As for how many "tickets" will be available to go forth from Iowa, Gross says "historically it's three, but unless the dynamic changes it could be two."

The view that McCain and Romney have the superior Iowa organizations is not limited to their partisans. Steve Scheffler, president of the influential Iowa Christian Alliance, has not yet weighed in on the race and is hesitant to appear as favoring any of the candidates, all of whom are seeking his support. But he concedes that it's in the McCain and Romney camps "where most of the aggressive courting is happening." He adds, "The time is coming where candidates better have their act together." If it's not "shortly after the first of the year, they're going to have a hard time catching up." (Bad news for someone like Newt Gingrich, who says he won't make a presidential announcement until the fall of 2007.)

LITTLE STATE, BIG EFFORTS

Things are moving just as fast in the next crucial state, New Hampshire. Perhaps nowhere has the competition for early support been as hard-fought. Just before Election Day, both campaigns put out lists of endorsements by dozens of activists. According to Tom Rath, a New Hampshire lawyer and senior adviser to Romney in the Granite State, these lists weren't just empty press releases. All year, the two camps "worked very hard, competing against one another" for these supporters. "This is the real deal up here," Rath continues. "Both teams are acting like it's a real campaign, and that makes it harder [for anybody else] to jump-start" an effort.

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Rath concedes that McCain, who defeated President Bush by 19 percent in the state's 2000 primary, is still "the president of New Hampshire," but says that circumstances will be different when '08 rolls around. McCain has to "remain a gadfly, maverick, outsider, but at the same time say to the establishment of the party that 'I will put this party back together and run it.'" There is, Rath argues, an "internal inconsistency in those two things." As for Romney, Rath says, "he's a little bit younger," and he "radiates energy and intellect."

Peter Spaulding, McCain's 2000 New Hampshire chairman and a state executive councilor, acknowledges that Romney "has done a good job of coalescing the anti-McCain activists in the state." But Spaulding argues that one of Romney's biggest assets there, his name recognition courtesy of the Boston media's penetration into southern New Hampshire, also has its drawbacks. "People are quite aware of the different positions he had in '94 and '02," Spaulding contends, referring to the more moderate social stances Romney took in unsuccessfully challenging Sen. Ted Kennedy, and subsequently in his winning gubernatorial bid.

A late entrant into the field would probably have only until this spring to get into the race, says Spaulding. Joel Maiola, chief of staff to New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg, says that "anybody who wants to jump in better jump in quickly." By February, Maiola says, any candidate hoping to play in New Hampshire ought to have an infrastructure in place. As for his boss, Maiola says the senator has met with everybody in the field and "you'll see him involved early next year once he makes up his mind."

MEANWHILE, DOWN SOUTH ...

South Carolina has served as a firewall protecting establishment Republican candidates in the last four contested nomination battles. In 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000, the Palmetto State was where insurgencies came to die. Richard Quinn, a longtime South Carolina GOP consultant, has seen them all, but is especially familiar with the most recent. Quinn served as McCain's top strategist in that now-famous 2000 primary where the Straight Talk Express was derailed by Governor Bush's juggernaut of a campaign. This time, though, Quinn says it will be his client who is the force to be reckoned with. "The McCain campaign almost has a position similar to the Bush campaign in 1999," he contends. For one thing, "there is something in the Republican mindset about a candidate who pays their dues, loses, and comes back." Reagan got his shot four years after challenging Ford in '76; Bush 41 ran surprisingly well in '80, waited patiently for eight years as VP, and then was rewarded with the nomination in '88; and Bob Dole was up in '96 after failed runs in '80 and '88.

Besides, McCain is just "the right leader for the times," says Quinn. And he points out that nearly 30 members of the legislature, multiple statewide officials, and a growing number of top Bush donors in the state agree. The McCain forces say that, much as in New Hampshire, their task is made easier in South Carolina by the still-intact base of support they start off with from their last bid (McCain won 42 percent in the 2000 primary).

As for Romney, Quinn allows that the governor is a "glamorous-looking guy from Central Casting," but says he'll need to "overcome" the centrist image he carved out in his two statewide runs in Massachusetts. And, Quinn notes, Romney "hasn't really had much to say about Iraq."

Terry Sullivan, another South Carolina Republican strategist, believes that McCain will be the frontrunner coming into the primary, but considers Romney a serious contender in the state. "It's a two-man game," says Sullivan, who is likely to join Romney's camp. The governor will have "a surprising and impressive team" in South Carolina, including many from the Bush 2000 campaign who feel that they got a "bum rap" for their role in that bare-knuckled primary. Sullivan says the Bush side wasn't the only one playing hardball then--or now. McCain's camp, he notes, is already attacking Romney by sending e-mails to activists high-lighting moderate former stances of the governor that won't play well in conservative South Carolina. One of these e-mails, obtained by NATIONAL REVIEW, draws attention to a recent Boston Globe story about Romney's views on gay rights when he ran for the Senate in '94.

Another sign of the brewing McCain-Romney battle in the state was the recent news that Warren Tompkins, Bush's top South Carolina consultant in 2000 and Quinn's bete noire, had signed on with Romney. With South Carolina's top kingmaker, the late former governor Carroll Campbell, gone, the state is increasingly run by its consultant class. That a top player such as Tompkins is going with Romney lends credence to the view that the governor is the only viable alternative to McCain.

THE NEW YORKER?

There is, of course, another potentially viable alternative. But whether Rudy Giuliani is actually in the field remains to be seen. Yes, "America's mayor" filed the requisite paperwork to form an exploratory committee last month. But Republicans in the early nominating states say Giuliani is nowhere near McCain and Romney in terms of organization, and many say they're not convinced he will mount a full-fledged campaign. Giuliani is reportedly just now starting to reach out to the grassroots. He of course retains a reservoir of goodwill with Republicans because of his 9/11 heroics, and starts off with 100 percent name recognition--but that doesn't mean he can skip wooing the party base.

Giuliani, perhaps more than any other candidate, should be spending time on what one McCain adviser calls the "non-sexy blocking and tackling" of the game. Who else has more to prove to the conservatives who dominate the GOP's nominating process than the pro-abortion-rights, pro-gay-rights, anti-gun Giuliani?

A year remains before the first vote is cast, and much can happen between now and then. But unless Giuliani starts to make some serious moves in the early-primary states--or something drastic and unforeseen happens--we can expect a fiercely fought mano-a-mano GOP presidential contest in 2007.