EW YORK - The season's hottest Senate battle sees its first real skirmish tonight, as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rick Lazio meet for a televised debate.
Despite years of public speaking, Clinton has never engaged in this sort of candidates' forum - a point she has made several times lately, in a stab at lowering expectations.
Yet, several politicians and analysts say it is Lazio - the four-term congressman from Long Island - whose performance could transform the tenor of the race, one way or the other, in a single evening.
''Everybody has a fairly well-formed opinion of Hillary Clinton, but Rick Lazio remains a work-in-progress,'' Maurice Carroll, head of the Quinnipiac College Polling Institute, said yesterday.
''Lazio's job,'' he continued, ''will be to show he can play in the big leagues.''
One well-placed Republican agreed: ''If he looks good, shows he has some presence, shows he can talk in the same room with Hillary for an hour and not look foolish, then he comes out ahead.''
Clinton cleared a preliminary hurdle yesterday, winning the Democratic primary, 82-18. Her opponent, Mark McMahon, a little-known Manhattan doctor who had collected enough petition signatures to force the runoff, hoped to attract anti-Hillary protest votes. His showing confirmed pockets of opposition to Clinton within her party, but it fell well short of the 30 percent many thought he would need to embarrass her. Its significance was also diminished by the fact that so few of the state's 5 million Democrats knew about the primary. Only about 12 percent voted.
The first lady and her husband voted yesterday morning at a school near their new home in suburban Chappaqua. ''After all these years of her helping me, it was a thrill,'' President Clinton said after casting the ballot, his first as a New Yorker.
Lazio did not have to contend with a Republican primary.
Several top Republicans are anxious about tonight's debate - including, some say, Governor George Pataki, who handpicked Lazio to run for the Senate seat last May after New York's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, dropped out.
''There's a lot of disappointment with Lazio,'' said a close associate of Pataki's, who asked not to be identified. ''He's been a lazy campaigner. He hasn't made himself a visible force. He hasn't let people know who he is.''
Lazio has spent most of his campaign emphasizing who he is not. One fund-raising letter stated, in its entirety: ''It won't take me six pages to convince you to send me an urgently needed contribution for my United States Senate campaign in New York. It will only take six words. I'm running against Hillary Rodham Clinton.''
This tactic catapulted the previously obscure Lazio to a neck-and-neck race with Clinton just a week after entering the race. But he has not advanced in the months since.
Clinton has not made much progress, either.
Four statewide polls, taken over the past week, show her and Lazio essentially tied. In all four, Clinton is ahead, but by fewer percentage points than the statistical margin of error.
Clinton knows she rankles many people. So, from the outset of her campaign, she has emphasized key issues - education, health care, Social Security - on which the majority of New Yorkers agree with her positions.
''If the election is decided on the issues,'' Carroll said, ''she wins.''
By the same token, the more genial Lazio has focused on character. The refrain in one of his TV ads is, ''Hillary Clinton - you just can't trust her.''
In the process, however, Lazio's nice-guy image has deteriorated, polls show. Last June, a Zogby poll found 55 percent of likely voters had a positive view of Lazio, while only 15 percent had a negative view. By last week, the positives were up slightly, to 59 percent, but the negatives had doubled to 32 percent.
By comparison, Clinton is viewed positively by 53 percent, negatively by 43 percent - about the same as when her campaign began in the summer of 1999.
Recently, Lazio has started emphasizing some issues. On Monday, he issued an education-reform proposal that would cost $98 billion over 10 years. Polls show voters consider education the most important issue - and Clinton as better-suited to deal with it. Lazio's plan gives him something to tout at tonight's debate.
