hey are not hugely popular with voters, consistently polling in single digits. Reporters don't rush to them for comment every time Governor George W. Bush or Senator John McCain makes news. They haven't got bulging coffers, armies of staffers, advertising blitzes, or special campaign windbreakers.
Yet Alan Keyes, Senator Orrin Hatch, and Gary Bauer are still here, chasing the Republican presidential nomination as fervently today as they were months ago.
Here is Bauer, going before feisty New Hampshire teenagers who don't like his views on religion and abortion, fighting the Bush campaign to be allowed to stand on a box to debate him.
Here is Keyes, driving across Iowa, drawing suburban crowds, scattering paid speaking engagements among the campaign stops to make up for his lost salary as a radio talk-show host, rebuking reporters who he says ignore him because he is black.
And here is Hatch, a Senate institution, looking mostly forlorn as his five rivals trade barbs around him, scraping together $50,000 for a televised, 28-minute, low-key ''fireside chat'' to Iowa audiences focused on the failings of the Clinton administration and on the details of his long record as a legislator.
Some voters, and even some Republicans, are asking why.
''They've had time to make an impact,'' said Richard Bond, former national chairman of the GOP. ''And they haven't. Either Bush or McCain is going to be the Republican nominee. And I would be much more interested in hearing their views fleshed out in greater detail than in Alan Keyes' temper tantrums.''
The three candidates steadfastly maintain they are running because they believe America needs them as president, that the other candidates can't cut it, and that if they could only catch a break, they'd walk away with the job.
Others impute less direct, and even less noble, motives to them: excessive ego, an attempt to raise their public profiles, a national platform for their views. All of which, of course, they deny.
Bauer, an antiabortion activist and former Reagan administration official, knows there are some who want him gone from the contest. He knows that his small roadside signs in dozens of New Hampshire towns are no match for the slick television advertisements produced by the campaigns of Bush, McCain, and Steve Forbes.
But when the lights go up and the TV cameras roll on for another in a seemingly interminable series of televised Republican debates, the low-tech publicity, sparsely attended news conferences, and derisive pundits fade away. Because on stage, everybody gets nearly equal time.
''For me, the most dramatic thing is going out in the debates and only seeing six chairs out there and realizing one of them is for you,'' Bauer said.
In the debates, each of the three candidates lagging in the polls has given their three rivals - and the debate moderators - plenty of grief. Witness Hatch's quip that he couldn't lift Forbes's wallet; Bauer's response of ''So would we, Governor'' to Bush's assertion that he would get to the White House and say, ''God help me''; and Keyes's loud refusal to yield the floor to NBC's Tim Russert.
For many observers, those debates are the keys to the three candidates' blind persistence.
''They get to stand on stage with the other candidates and present passionate and articulate positions,'' said Republican consultant Thomas Rath, who is running Bush's campaign in New Hampshire. ''This is their moment. Few of them harbor the illusion at the end of the day that absent some dramatic event, they'll be the nominee.''
Bauer, for example, gets the voice of Christian conservatives into every debate, as does Keyes. They both constantly invoke the Declaration of Independence, and its reference to a creator, to buttress their calls to reinsert morality into American public life.
''My guess is the reason Bauer is staying in the race is to make certain the Christian right has a voice at the nominating convention and a spokesperson who has some credibility nationally,'' said Rath.
Bauer rejects that claim. He was a voice at the last GOP convention as head of the Family Research Council, he argues. He's in it to win, he says. And he can still win it, because he's still here.
''People, who conventional wisdom would dictate would be in the race long after I was gone, are not,'' he said at a Milford, N.H., diner recently. ''The only thing that's changed is what name they throw up to me in interiews: `Mr. Bauer, come on, how can you possibly beat Elizabeth Dole?' `Mr. Bauer, come on, how can you possibly defeat Dan Quayle?'''
Some Republicans are happy to have Bauer and Keyes stick around.
''Keyes is a very eloquent speaker, and by staying in the race he elevates the party,'' said Will Abbott, who was then-Vice President George Bush's New Hampshire political director in 1988. ''Because he's black he elevates the party, demonstrates firsthand that there are black Republicans. And if he stays on the right side of Bush, he'll get a role in the government out of it.''
Keyes, who is chagrined by characterizations focused on his race, says he is in the race for the purest of purposes. ''If I get the nomination, I have the strongest chance of anybody in the field of winning the election,'' Keyes said.
Hatch, too, is convinced he is the best candidate.
''If I didn't think I could do a better job than all the rest of these people, I wouldn't be doing it,'' said the Utah senator.
If only he could get past the press.
''My problem today is not that people don't want me,'' he said. ''Everywhere I go, people say, `I wish you could make it, Senator.' But every interview I have, it starts out with `Senator, you're a giant in the Senate, you're one of the great senators,' - I'm not saying that, they say it - and `Why would you do this so late?' and `You don't have a chance.' Every one of them has said that.''
Hatch's candidacy ''really tugs at my heartstrings,'' said Bond, the former GOP chairman, ''because he has conducted himself with such humanity and dignity and probably of all of them carried the case against the Clinton administration most effectively.''
Bond said he is mystified as to why the senator is putting himself through the campaign. He said he wants Hatch, Keyes, and Bauer, to withdraw, for the good of whoever becomes the nominee.
''There's a degree of political correctness within the party and within the media that says if a person says they're running, that entitles them to the microphone,'' he said. ''And I believe that in the national debates in the fall and in these primary debates, there ought to be a basic viability test. It doesn't matter if they're a distinguished senator or loquacious talk-show host, there shold be a threshold of viability.''
