HARLESTON, S.C. - In the past, this state's Republican primary has been as much a graveyard for political insurgents like Senator John McCain as New Hampshire has been a launching pad. But yesterday, the uncommonly crisp winter air echoed with suspicions that the past may not be prologue.
Suddenly, the GOP primary here Feb. 19 - open to independents and Democrats with no competing Democratic contest - has a new label. Two days ago, it was the primary McCain had to win to stay alive. Though it may still be that, McCain's decisive victory in New Hampshire has now made South Carolina the primary Texas Governor George W. Bush cannot afford to lose.
''George Bush knows he must beat John McCain here,'' said Henry McMaster, the South Carolina Republican chairman. ''If McCain wins South Carolina after what he did in New Hampshire, he'll be hard to stop. His momentum would be huge.'' McMaster is neutral in the race. Even Richard N. Bond, who was GOP national chairman under President Bush, said a McCain victory here would make the Arizona senator's nomination a real possibility.
Yet Bush retains a strong advantage here. He has a sizable lead in recent polls. Voters, among them large contingent of religious conservatives, have political sentiments more to his liking. And Bush appears to have a strong organization and unlimited money to spend.
But after Tuesday, there's queasiness aplenty among Bush loyalists. His lead in the polls here seems certain to shrink - it was 20 points a week ago. The organization behind him has its own fissures. And McMaster, among others, said he expects a huge turnout among independents and Democrats who have shunned the low-turnout Republican primary in past years.
Weighing against Bush's many advantages here is one looming disadvantage: Much of his support in polls, here and nationally, is based on the premise that he was invincible in the nominating process, and would be the GOP's strongest candidate in November. And while Republican voters here have been more comfortable with establishment candidates in the past, GOP National Committeeman Buddy Witherspoon, a Columbia, S.C., orthodontist, said they also want to nominate a candidate who can reclaim the White House from the Democrats.
Armed with New Hampshire's results, McCain is now certain to raise that issue constantly.
''We have pierced the perception that George Bush is the inevitable nominee and the strongest general election candidate. At no time in modern political history has a front-runner taken such a drubbing right off the bat,'' said Trey Walker, McCain's national field director and a former director of the state GOP here.
Now, as Democrats await their next electoral matchup, the multi-state primaries on March 7 (South Carolina Democrats will hold a caucus March 9), South Carolina's GOP primary has taken on outsized proportions. And while Bush and McCain will not be alone on the ballot, they alone have invested heavily here.
''South Carolina is now like New Hampshire. Our importance will also be greatly magnified,'' said William V. Moore, a political scientist at the College of Charleston. If New Hampshire transformed what appeared to be a lopsided contest in Bush's favor into a two-man battle, Moore said, then South Carolina may well go a long way toward determining the outcome.
McCain supporters, elated over the breadth of their candidate's victory on Tuesday - he even beat Bush handily among registered Republicans - say the landscape here has changed dramatically in their candidate's favor. Still, many of them concede that Bush remains the favorite and say McCain cannot afford a misstep here in the next 16 days.
''We have moved from what was always our best state, New Hampshire, to a very difficult state for us, given George Bush's advantages in South Carolina,'' noted William D. McInturff, McCain's polltaker and longtime adviser.
Among other things, McInturff said, Bush has an advantage among self-described Christian conservatives that McCain must work to overcome. In New Hampshire, Christian conservatives constituted just 16 percent of GOP primary voters and favored Bush over McCain, according to exit polling data. In South Carolina, an estimated 35 percent of GOP primary voters, and maybe more, consider themselves part of the so-called religious right.
If McCain is vulnerable with conservative Christian voters, abortion is clearly the reason. Some of his statements on the issue have been ambiguous, despite his strong antiabortion voting record. The National Right to Life Committee is already running radio ads attacking McCain here.
''John McCain has three different positions on abortion, and we're not going to let him get away with that here,'' former Republican Governor David Beasley said in an interview last night. ''John McCain will not win conservative votes here. He will not win any Christian conservative votes.''
From the outset here, McCain has claimed his own advantage, and Walker reemphasized the point in an interview: No state, he said, has a higher proportion of military veterans than South Carolina - and they are natural McCain supporters. But McCain's campaign may have overstated the numbers, according to a Globe examination of government data on veterans. Twenty-five states, New Hampshire among them, have higher percentages of veterans than South Carolina. And here, more than a quarter of veterans are blacks - unlikely GOP primary voters.
Even though veterans make up less than 10 percent of South Carolina's population, McCain is making a major effort to organize them. And with good reason: Few Republicans here, McCain's supporters included, think he can win unless his reformist message pulls a significant number of new voters to the polls two weeks from Saturday.
While the state has no voter registration by party, its GOP presidential primary has typically been a low-turnout affair dominated by Republican activists. In 1996, for example, just 276,000 voters, out of 2 million registered, participated in the primary, according to McMaster.
This time, McMaster said, he expects well over 300,000 voters. Just to be safe, he added, the party has printed one million ballots.
Bond, the former national party chairman, said McCain's messsage might resonate with some potential new voters. The Arizona senator, Bond said, ''has that outsider Ross Perot message without having Perot's extra chromosomes.''
One thing's for sure: Governor Bush will have no excuse if he loses here. The state seems tailor-made for him: He's the brand-name Republican candidate. He's a fellow Southerner - and unlike his father, he even sounds like one. The state party establishment is behind him. And South Carolina Republicans are noticeably more conservative than their New Hampshire counterparts. They are also much less likely to repudiate the establishment candidate. Indeed, for evidence of South Carolina's comfort with the status quo, some here point to the ages of the state's two US senators, Strom Thurmond and Ernest Hollings - 97 and 78, respectively, with a combined 78 years in the Senate.
But by most accounts yesterday, Bush would be foolish to believe that GOP voters here will reflexively reject McCain much as they did upstart challengers to Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bush's father in 1988 and 1992 and Senator Bob Dole in 1996. Reagan was enormously popular in the South in 1980. The elder Bush arrived here in 1988 after a win, not the breathtaking loss his son has just sustained. And the insurgent whose hopes were dashed on the political shoals here in 1992 and 1996 was the idiosyncratic Pat Buchanan.
The axiom that South Carolina Republicans automatically sweep aside insurgents ''has never truly been tested,'' said Donald J. Devine, a longtime Republican activist who worked for Reagan in 1980 and Dole in 1988.
Moreover, said McCain pollster McInturff, ''George W. Bush is not Ronald Reagan, not his father and not even Bob Dole. No one in America knows this guy, and voters who do are starting to conclude that there's no there there.'' Republicans, McInturff said, are most intent on picking a nominee who can win in November. In the next two weeks, he added, McCain has a chance to convince them that he is the party's best hope in November.
What's more, the state party apparatus that served Bush's father so well in two primaries has lost some of its muscle. National committeeman Witherspoon, for one, says the organization ''is not as effective as it once was.'' That's partly because the GOP lost the governor's office in 1998.
''The supposed Republican machine has aged and atrophied. Institutional support just doesn't matter the way it used to,'' said US Representative Mark Sanford. Sanford, US Representative Lindsey Graham and a third of the party's state legislators have bucked the party establishment to support McCain.
As in other states, including New Hampshire until last week, few voters here have paid close attention to the primary. Analysts like political scientist Moore believe that what the candidates say in the days ahead, including a televised debate Feb. 15, will be decisive.
Moore, like others, believes Bush remains the favorite. But whether that continues may depend on what he does in the days ahead.
''Right now, he seems like Humpty Dumpty,'' Moore said. ''He's taken a great fall. His campaign is going to try to put him together again, and everyone here is going to be watching to see how they do that.''
