DETROIT -- George W. Bush remains the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination despite his loss to John McCain in the Michigan primary -- but the night's real winner may be Democrat Al Gore, political analysts said Tuesday.

Political scientists contacted by Reuters said McCain, a three-term U.S. senator from Arizona, faced a tough road ahead to take the nomination from Bush, the governor of Texas.

But McCain had gained at least another two weeks in which he could continue to beat up on Bush and drive him further to the political right. McCain also won his home state of Arizona.

"I still don't see how McCain gets the nomination. The party regulars and the Republican establishment seems more set against him than ever," said Dean Spiliotes, a political scientist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

If Bush had won Michigan after beating McCain in South Carolina last weekend, the McCain challenge would have faded. Now the final showdown will not come at least until March 7 when California, New York, Ohio and nine other states hold Republican primaries.

If McCain does well that night the battle may continue deep into the spring.

"Bush will have to keep pouring money into this campaign. He will have to go negative against McCain again and risk turning off the independent voters who like McCain," said Mark Rozell, a political scientist with Catholic University.

All that is good news for Vice President Gore, who seems to have his own Democratic Party nomination well in hand and is already looking ahead to the Nov. 7 presidential election.

"McCain has turned into the best friend the Democrats could have wished for in 2000," said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.

McCain only won in Michigan because the primary was open to all voters, Democrats and independents as well as Republicans.

They flocked to the polls in huge numbers, helping to create a record turnout of more than one million, and voted en masse for McCain.

Bush carried the Republican vote by 67-25 percent, according to exit polls. But Republicans were only 49 percent of the electorate.

That will not be the case in most of the upcoming states. In California there will be two vote tallies, one of all voters and one of Republicans only. The Republican vote will determine who gets the state's 162 delegates to the Republican National Convention -- over 15 percent of the 1,035 needed to win the presidential nomination.

Bush could find himself in the highly embarrassing position of losing the popular vote to McCain and collecting all the delegates in the largest and most politically important state in the country.

The problem for Bush is that McCain is running in the political center, forcing the Texas governor to go to the right where his conservative base lies.

Gore, by contrast, is running in the center while his opponent, former Sen. Bill Bradley, has staked out a position on the left. History teaches that the candidate that captures the political center usually wins the White House.

"The person who wins the election in November will be the one who occupies the big central space that President Clinton has occupied for the past eight years," said Spiliotes.

To deflect the McCain challenge, Bush has had to make serious political sacrifices. He has embraced the conservative Christian Coalition; he visited Bob Jones University, a Christian fundamentalist college that bans inter-racial dating; and he came out in favor of keeping the Republican Party platform plank that seeks to ban all abortions.

"Bush has moved sharply to the right. People will remember his visit to Bob Jones University. That place is a symbol of racial discrimination, an unforgettable symbol," said historian Allan Lichtman of the American University.

All these matters may come back to haunt Bush in the autumn if he eventually wins the Republican nomination.

"Bush may survive the spring, but he looks like a much weaker candidate for the fall," said political scientist John Aldrich of Duke University in North Carolina.