With the debates history, the presidential campaign focus shifts now from prime-time polemics to Electoral College calculus.
Dull, you say? Not compared with 90 minutes spent listening to Al Gore's fulsome warnings about the lucre George W. Bush would give the top 1 percent, or Bush's fractured rebuttals that Gore would reward only his chosen people.
If the race stays razor close, it will be the geographical chess of the Electoral College as much as national trends that ends up deciding the election.
So what can one say, with Election Day fewer than three weeks away? The most dramatic point is this: Vice President Gore has surrendered many of the Electoral College gains in the South and West that helped put the Democrats in office in 1992. Elected as part of a centrist Southern team, Gore faces an Electoral College dilemma that more typically confronts a Northern liberal Democratic nominee.
Entering the home stretch, not one Southern state - including his native Tennessee - can be counted solidly in the Democratic column. Beyond the regional-border state of West Virginia, none even leans Democratic.
In the West, though the Democrats have solidified California, they show little of the strength Bill Clinton did in 1992, when he carried six other states as well. At best, one of them (Washington) may lean toward Gore.
The result? Although the Clinton-Gore ticket won 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996, at the moment, ''Gore is looking at a maximum of about 310'' possible electoral votes from which to assemble the needed 270, contends Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies.
''And that's if everything falls right.''
Of course, how things fall can change rapidly in the next few weeks. And with this contest closer than any in 40 years, handicapping electoral votes is especially tricky. That said, it's hard to ignore the fact that things have not been breaking Gore's way, electorally speaking.
While attention has been fixed on national polls, six states have, from his perspective, been behaving badly.
Texas's Governor Bush has bobbed ahead in Gore's own Tennessee. Louisiana, which Clinton and Gore won in both 1992 and 1996, has proved stubbornly resistant to Gore. Arkansas, Clinton's home state, is now rated a tossup rather than a shoo-in. Florida, which Clinton won in 1996 and where Gore has succeeded in making a race of it, now appears to have shifted slightly back toward Bush.
Out west, meanwhile, Washington and Oregon, reliably Democratic since Michael Dukakis's 1988 campaign, remain battlegrounds.
Individually, no single state is crucial. Yet considered as political pointillism, they outline the challenge the Democrats face as they try to cobble together 270 electoral votes.
''If the Republicans can take almost half the states off the board, that means they can focus on the remaining 25, then try to cherry-pick the juiciest targets,'' says Ralph Whitehead, a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.
Why, in a time of peace and prosperity, has the in-party sacrificed the regional gains that brought it to office?
One reason is that after having successfully positioned themselves as moderates in 1992, they are once again at risk of being seen as more liberal national Democrats.
''Gore has generally run to the left of Clinton,'' notes CNN political commentator William Schneider. ''It started when he had to compete with Bill Bradley [in the Democratic primaries] and he hasn't really renavigated to the center because of concern over the Nader factor.''
Meanwhile, the selection of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman has pulled Gore loose from the mooring of his moderate Southern identity, says political analyst Steven Stark.
''Gore Northernized himself with that selection, and ever since he has been running as a national Democrat, not a Southern Democrat,'' Stark contends.
That's a problem. Since 1968, the only two Democrats to be elected president have been Southerners with pull in the region. Jimmy Carter won in 1976 because, except for Virginia, he was able to carry the entire region, rolling out of the South and regional-border states with 145 electoral votes, then adding Democratic states in the East and industrial Midwest.
The best indication of Carter's Southern boost was this: He was able to amass 297 electoral votes while winning only one of the 17 continental states west of the vertical column that runs from Minnesota to Louisiana. (A big one it was, too: Texas.)
But by 1980, with the country in recession, Dixie went south on Carter, with only his home state of Georgia and West Virginia sticking by him.
After that, the Democrats faced a dispiriting drought. For the next two elections, they won nothing south of West Virginia.
To put it in perspective, from 1980 through 1988, save for Carter's native Georgia, the Democratic ticket made no inroads in a region that, if one includes Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia, now comprises 171 electoral votes.
Yet it's not just the South that has vexed (and hexed) the Democrats. The Plains states and the West have also proved resistant. Excluding reliable Hawaii, in the five elections from 1968 through 1984, the Democrats won only three states west of Minnesota: Texas twice, Washington once.
That began to change in 1988, when Dukakis put both Washington and Oregon in the Democratic column. But only when Clinton won the nomination in 1992, then reinforced his moderate appeal by putting Gore on the ticket, did the Democrats really find the keys to the GOP's lock on the Electoral College.
Even then, Clinton didn't win the South the way Carter had 16 years earlier. The biggest electoral prizes, Texas and Florida, stayed Republican, as did Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
But Clinton collected Kentucky and Missouri, his and Gore's home states of Arkansas and Tennessee, plus Louisiana and Georgia. Minus those 58 electoral votes, the South wasn't solid for the GOP anymore.
More significantly still, Clinton completed California's transition to a Democratic state, and added Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, for 74 electoral votes that had previously been Republican. Throw in Washington and Oregon, and the Democrats had a Western base worth 92 electoral votes.
Unlike Carter's, Clinton's was truly a national victory (albeit in a race with a strong third-party candidate), the first time a Democrat had shown strength in every region of the country since Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide.
In 1996, when the incumbent Democrats lost Georgia, but picked up Florida (thus swapping 13 electoral votes for 25) and added Arizona while ceding Montana and Colorado, the picture was still of a candidate with significant nationwide pull.
But by mid-October 2000, despite a prolonged period of peace and prosperity, Gore doesn't enjoy similar national strength.
Part of his problem is that he faces another Southerner, even while his own regional identity has undergone a redefinition.
''I am convinced that he is seen, even in Tennessee, as being from Washington, D.C.,'' says Sabato. ''He is Al Gore, of Washington D.C., versus George Bush of Texas.''
Not only is Bush a Southern governor, but his brother Jeb holds the governor's office in Florida, a state that went Democratic in 1996 and otherwise might be a strong bet to do so again.
It's good news for Gore that he remains competitive in the Sunshine State; a victory there all but assures he is the next president.
The bad news is that Bush appears to have again edged into the lead there; with Jeb in the governor's office, most observers think the state will ultimately go Republican.
In sum, the South is reacting to the Democratic ticket much the way it has in the past to one headed by a Northern Democrat.
Now look West. Although first-prize California remains in Gore's column, no other Western state is solid for him. Washington leans a little his way, but of the other states Clinton won at least once, Oregon, Nevada, and New Mexico are rated tossups, while Arizona, Montana, and Colorado lean Republican.
That's why Gore is struggling to fill in a base centered on the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, and the Pacific Coast.
It's possible to cobble together an Electoral College majority that way, certainly, but miss one mid-sized stepping stone and it's into the torrent, with no hope of recovery.
Doing the Electoral College calculus, even one with generous assumptions, shows how slim the Democrats' margin for error is. Subtract the states that Clinton won in 1992, but which now lean Bushward (Ohio, Montana, Colorado, Louisiana, Georgia, and Kentucky) and Clinton's 370 dwindles to 308.
Award Gore only the most likely four (Washington, Oregon, Tennessee, West Virginia) of the eight Western, Southern, or regional-border states Clinton won in 1992 but which are now considered tossups, and suddenly Gore's count shrinks to 282.
That's a mere dozen over a victorious Electoral College tally. And it assumes Gore wins essential Democratic stepping stones like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Right now, both are too close to call. Losing either probably dooms the Dems.
That's how tight things are. And that's why the math of the Electoral College map, normally mooted by larger national trends, is suddenly where the campaign action is.
