EW YORK - Every Sunday, during the past several weeks, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been preaching in the black churches of Harlem, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Buffalo. She's got it down, the sing-song cadences, the repeated refrains, and as she builds to her sermon's climax, the congregations erupt in applause, shouting ''Amen!'' ''Tell it!'' and ''All right, Hillary!''
African-American votes could be decisive in Clinton's bid for the Senate.
She already has their support. Several polls show her leading among black voters by a 95-3 margin. One puts her at 95-0.
However, this means little unless they go out and vote. And that is what she and her most passionate supporters - black and Hispanic politicians, church pastors, and union leaders - are trying to make sure they do.
''The key here is turnout, turnout, turnout,'' said C. Virginia Fields, Manhattan's borough president, who is black.
Numbers tell the story. African-Americans make up 17 percent of New York state's voting-age population, but in the last two elections only 9 percent of its actual voters. If they turned out in even slightly greater numbers, and if the election turns out to be a close one, they could push Clinton over the top.
Local 1199, the health-workers' division of the Service Employees International Union, has a slogan summing up the point: ''We vote, we win. It's that simple.''
Dennis Rivera, 1199's president - 49 years old, half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican - has emerged in the past couple of years as the city's most powerful labor leader. His union has expanded to 200,000 members with about 80 percent of them minorities. About 11,000 have pledged to work as get-out-the-vote volunteers on or around Election Day.
Inside Rivera's headquarters, a block west of Times Square, 80 workers sit at phone banks, calling the volunteers to remind them what to do and where to go, and recording their responses in a bar-code that becomes part of each member's permanent database file.
In another room, a techie named Peter Hack sits at a computerized map that shows the location of every registered member, by county, city, ZIP code, all the way down to block-by-block and apartment-by-apartment, so that when volunteers go knocking on doors they know which doors to knock on.
In the union's ''war room,'' three walls of charts list every hospital and health-care facility in the city, how many registered members work there, and the name of the volunteer who has been assigned to make sure they all vote.
Rivera's union cut its political teeth in the 1998 Senate election, when Democrat Charles Schumer beat three-term Republican incumbent Alfonse D'Amato. Schumer, who won 54 percent to 44 percent, a larger spread than anyone had predicted, credited the larger-than-usual turnout in the union's prime turf - Washington Heights, Harlem, the Bronx, Flatbush, and southwestern Queens.
However, according to Jennifer Cunningham, executive director of the union's state council, the '98 effort was nothing compared with this campaign. ''We had fewer people working, we were much less systematic, and all this technology didn't exist,'' she said. ''Back then, a ton of people wanted to volunteer, but we had no way to reach them or tell them what to do.''
Representative Charles Rangel, the dean of New York's congressional delegation, is also using every cog of his Harlem political machine to ensure a large turnout. Rangel was the one who first pushed Clinton to run for Senate. If the Democrats regain control of the House, he stands to become chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. If Clinton wins the Senate seat, Rangel's contribution would cement his standing as the city's most powerful black politician eclipsing the Rev. Al Sharpton, who, partly because Clinton has ignored him in her campaign, has done nothing for Clinton in return.
Similarly, the long-established black churches, and not Sharpton's various forums, are serving as Clinton's connection to the African-American communities.
''The churches are key,'' said David Bositis, senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, an African-American think tank. ''It's an organizational nexus. You've got people who come there every week.''
By law, churches cannot endorse political candidates. But since Clinton has near-unanimous support in the black communities, nearly every voter that a church registers - every senior citizen that it drives to the polling booth - is a vote for Clinton.
Many of these churches have enormous congregations. About 2,500 worshipers turned out at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem the Sunday Clinton spoke there.
''She was fantastic,'' recalled Ralphael Warnock, the church's assistant pastor. ''Everybody said so. I'd say she was a better speaker than even her husband.''
President Clinton is the key to much of the first lady's popularity in these communities. ''They associate her with an administration where people of color have been represented in unprecedented ways,'' Warnock said.
Bositis also noted that during Clinton's presidency, black unemployment has declined and black income has risen more sharply than comparable statistics for white people.
In nationwide polls that Bositis has run for the NAACP, when respondents are asked how they are doing financially compared with the year before - better, worse, or the same - more black people than white people answer ''better,'' and they have done so now for three consecutive years.
As a result, 91 percent of African-Americans have a favorable image of President Clinton. ''I could ask them about Moses and the numbers would be lower,'' Bositis said.
In this Senate race, these high marks are rubbing off on the first lady.
Furthermore, just as their bonds with the president were sealed during the Republican drive to impeach him, so do many black voters feel a heightened attachment to the first lady as a result of the treatment she has received during the Lewinsky scandal and in her Senate campaign.
''Understand,'' Warnock said, ''if it weren't for the president's friendly policies, none of this would matter. But there is an inclination for people of color to identify with anybody who they feel is being persecuted.''
When Mrs. Clinton speaks at black churches, her two biggest applause lines push these buttons. ''When I say I'll stick with you,'' she always says, her volume building, ''I'll stick with you, and I need you to stick with me.''
The churchgoers, knowing she is talking as much about her loyalty to her husband as about any social issue, roar with approval.
The other big moment comes when she recites the tale of Harriet Tubman, the escaped slave who kept going back to the plantation to help others break free. ''She would say to them,'' Clinton intones, ''`No matter what happens, keep going. If you hear gunshots, keep going. If you hear footsteps and shouts behind you, keep going. If you hear the barking of the dogs that are trying to hunt you down, keep going.'''
Once more, as they catch the parallels between Mrs. Clinton and their own folk hero, the crowd cheers her on.
