RLINGTON, Va. - Former governor George Allen, embroiled in a bitter election challenge to Democratic Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia, flew into town the other morning with a dozen regular citizens - including a history teacher, an accountant, a cobbler, and a retired Navy officer - in an effort to show how one election can make a difference.
Indeed, the testimony of the Virginians whom Allen calls ''real people in the real world'' - they spoke of battling illegal drugs, using DNA evidence to track down murderers, struggling to keep a small business alive - suggested that the Senate race could be more significant to the state than the presidential contest.
That might be right. This race, being contested in sight of the Capitol, is one of scores of Senate and House races that are just as close, just as intense and - forgotten in the national obsession with the glamour of presidential politics - perhaps just as important as the battle for the White House.
But the congressional elections - the 469 House and Senate elections that, taken together, will determine whether the next president can preserve Social Security or how the next president uses the budget surplus - are also as unfocused and as frustrating as the presidential election.
These congressional elections - so elusive to define, so difficult to evaluate - come, moreover, at a time when voters hold Congress in far lower esteem than the other two branches of the federal government. The effect of this diffuse and decentralized struggle for control of the House and Senate contests may be to erode even further the public's confidence in the national Legislature even as it makes it more difficult for Congress to execute the new president's priorities, or its own.
Though surveys find that only one American in eight has a great deal of confidence in Congress, and fewer than half of Americans say they care who won the last set of congressional elections, the success or failure of the next president will be determined less at the White House than on Capitol Hill.
In the chamber of the House Ways and Means Committee, the next president's tax bill will be debated and, almost certainly, reshaped. In the Senate Judiciary Committee, the confirmation of the next president's attorney general and, probably, the next president's Supreme Court nominees will be determined. In the rarefied air of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the next president's treaties, including perhaps adjustments to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the successor states of the former Soviet Union, will be tested.
''The president cannot get anything done without the Congress, and whether the president faces a Congress of his own party or an opposition party can make the whole difference in the destiny of the country,'' said David T. Canon, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The presidential candidates are talking bravely about the budget, education initiatives, Medicare adjustments, prescription-drug plans in campaign appearances. But the president's power is merely to propose and, later, to veto. It is the Congress that disposes, though another closely divided Congress may not be able to dispose of much of anything.
This Congress, which this week will continue its struggle to complete its business, was the third in a row controlled by the Republicans after four decades of general Democratic rule. But the margins in both chambers are slim, and small adjustments in public sentiment in the next 10 days could determine control of the Congress - and the contours of American politics for the next two years, or more.
Right now, a switch in only seven seats in the House could return the chamber to the Democrats; with two independents in the body, the Republicans hold a 223-210 advantage. A switch in only four seats in the Senate would split the body right down the middle, giving the new vice president (playing his role as president of the Senate with the power to break ties) unusual power in Washington; Republicans now hold a 54-46 advantage.
The battle for control of the Congress is being conducted under the radar of American public concern.
Political scientists and political professionals view the 435 House elections and the 34 Senate elections conducted next month as 469 individual races - buffeted, to be sure, by national political trends but still local in character, determined, like the Virginia Senate race, as much by the personalities of the contenders and their personal records as by broader political crosswinds.
In Virginia, for example, the Senate race is in part about whether Allen, the Republican who sat in the governor's chair between 1990 and 1994, or Robb, who occupied the governor's office between 1982 and 1986, had a stronger state education or transportation policy.
Ground zero of the Virginia senate race is in northern Virginia, home to government workers, high-tech empires, and retired military personnel. It is an area of peculiar political awareness, with voters deciding whether Robb, the son-in-law of the late President Lyndon B. Johnson, has failed to live up to his potential as a leader in the New Democrat model and whether Allen, the son of a revered Washington Redskins football coach, is too conservative even for Virginia. A Washington Post poll released yesterday showed the two candidates in a virtual tie.
But in this race are also the seeds of national political confusion.
The party that wins the Virginia election claims 1 percent of the Senate. But a Robb victory, for example, would send no signal about the nature of the broader political scene; even if the Democrat wins reelection, there is no chance that Vice President Al Gore will take Virginia. And a Democratic victory in the Senate race in Virginia would send mixed signals about a tax cut; Robb has spent much of the last month attacking Allen's plan for deep tax cuts and a $1,000-per-child tax credit.
If Allen topples Robb, who is far from the liberal fringes of his party, his victory will be explained as a personal triumph over an incumbent whose failings are more personal than political.
Multiply the Virgina effect across the country, and the message is important. But if the margins remain close, it is largely inscrutable.
''Congressional elections are not winner-take-all elections like the presidential election,'' said Charles S. Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia at Athens. ''They are elections of finer grain, and they give you, in the House contests, 52 different versions of what California is like, or wants, instead of one version.''
Sometimes these verdicts are contradictory. Montana, which has an area of 145,556 square miles but only 879,372 people, gets one seat in the House. Representative Rick Hill, the GOP incumbent, is retiring, and there is a chance that the Democrat, Superintendent of Public Instruction Nancy Keenan, may defeat the Republican candidate, former Lieutenant Governor Dennis Rehberg. But if Keenan does win and Governor George W. Bush takes the state, as expected, what will be the message from Montana?
At the same time, in north-central Utah, the Republican incumbent, Representative Merrill Cook, was defeated in a bruising primary by Internet businessman Derek Smith. But the Republicans are facing a strong challenge from businessman Jim Matheson, the son of Scott Matheson, a former governor. The message from Utah will be similarly muddled if the Democrat Matheson prevails in a state that is one of Bush's strongest redoubts.
The new president will probably enjoy high approval ratings in his first several months; President Clinton was unusual in having a sharply abbreviated honeymoon in the capital. But the Congress that will take the measure of the man in the Oval Office has little support and respect among the public.
For more than a third of a century, the Gallup Organization has been conducting public-opinion surveys that seek to measure public confidence in government. The latest soundings show that public confidence in the legislative branch of government is by far the lowest of the three branches.
The Gallup survey conducted in December 1998 showed that 27 percent of Americans had a ''great deal'' of confidence in the Supreme Court and that 24 percent of Americans had a ''great deal'' of confidence in the executive branch, a figure that might be artificially low given that the survey was taken 10 days after the impeachment of President Clinton.
That same survey showed that only 13 percent of Americans had a ''great deal'' of confidence in the Congress. (Public confidence in Congress was even lower in the middle of 1997, when only 6 percent of Americans said they had a ''great deal'' of trust in the institution.) A separate Gallup survey taken this fall showed that the public, by a margin of 47 percent to 39 percent, preferred Clinton's approach to policy to the Republican congressional leadership's.
The Republican Congress is naturally wary of Gore, but neither the election of Gore nor the continuance of GOP leadership on Capitol Hill is assured. Even some Republicans in Congress are wary of Bush, who in debates and on the stump has repeatedly criticized Washington and, implicit in that criticism, Congress.
In that regard, Bush is running for president much the way Jimmy Carter did in 1976 and Ronald Reagan did four years later - as an outsider.
''He's saying he can foster bipartisanship,'' says Kathleen P. Iannello, a political scientist at Gettysburg College. ''If he wins, he could be in big trouble when he gets to Washington, because he's going to find he can't instantly create bipartisanship.''
Carter stumbled in his relationship with Congress, even alienating the Democrats who were elected with him. Reagan had enormous success on Capitol Hill, winning large budget and tax cuts from a Democratic Congress in his first year and then a landmark tax overhaul in his fifth year in office.
But a President Bush or a President Gore would probably win a slim margin of victory and would probably face a Congress with slim margins of majority, either in the new president's favor or against it. And therein lies a prescription for struggle - and stalemate.
