NORTH PROVIDENCE - Although she is a lifelong Democrat, Norma Terri of Providence says her vote in the US Senate race here will go to the Republican incumbent, Lincoln Chafee.
''I had a lot of respect for his father, and I think the young one will do as good a job,'' Terri, 69, a retired office manager, said in reference to John H. Chafee, the longtime senator who died last year.
Another Democrat, homemaker Dana Antonelli, 35, said she is also voting for Chafee - even though the only political office he held before being appointed to complete his father's term was mayor of Warwick.
''His not being in politics - if anything, that's a plus,'' said Antonelli.
So it goes in the Rhode Island election, where Lincoln Chafee, a Republican newcomer in a state that usually elects Democrats, has confounded political analysts who called his seat endangered.
The Senate race is the main attraction in an otherwise quiet election, at least in statewide races.
Chafee's Democratic rival, US Representative Robert Weygand, lags so far behind in polls that the national Republican Party dropped $325,000 worth of TV ads for Chafee in the final stretch.
A recent Brown University poll showed Chafee, 47, drawing strong support from union members, Democrats, and Independents, which is crucial in a state that is only 14 percent Republican.
''Rhode Island is seen as a Democratic state, but the largest voter group is the Independents,'' said Darrell West, the Brown political science professor who oversaw the poll. Chafee appeals to them as a moderate Republican who has gone against his own party on issues such as gun control and abortion rights.
Chafee's resume isn't an obvious fit with a political career. He graduated from Brown Univerity in 1975 with a degree in classics, after which he spent seven years shoeing horses. He has admitted using cocaine in his youth. As mayor of Warwick he maintained a $6,000 slush fund to pay for, among other things, pet frogs for a city hall fish tank, sleds for city workers' families and charitable donations. Previous mayors did the same, he said.
None of that appears to have troubled voters.
Chafee, whose campaign theme is ''A Tradition of Trust,'' has clearly benefited from his name. His father John, who died Oct. 24, 1999, shortly after announcing his retirement, was a Yankee aristocrat and war hero who became one of the state's most beloved politicians.
Weygand has taken to complaining that he is not really running against Lincoln Chafee. ''I would be less than honest with you if I said we're not running against John Chafee because we are,'' he said last week.
Weygand, a two-term congressman who has bet his House seat on the race, has only recently begun to turn up the heat in criticizing Chafee's leadership skills. Political analysts say he may have waited too late his attack his opponent directly.
The Chafee-Weygand match is the main draw in the November election. There are no other major statewide races, and the Democratic candidates in the state's two races for the US House of Representatives, Patrick J. Kennedy in the First District and James R. Langevin in the Second District, are comfortably ahead.
Kennedy's Republican opponent, Stephen Cabral, a boiler operator from Tiverton, has no campaign spokesman and has raised little money. In their one debate, on Halloween, he accused Kennedy, who has traveled the nation as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, of using his office merely as a political springboard.
''I believe strongly in the Democratic agenda, and if I want a Democratic agenda I have to work for it,'' Kennedy responded.
The only referendum question getting much attention is a $25 million bond issue to finance a proposed Rhode Island history museum in Providence.
Polls have shown voters widely opposed to the measure. West speculated that some voters might be showing an anti-Providence bias. Other voters, accustomed to voting for bonds for public-works projects, are confused by bonds for a museum, he said.
Vice President Al Gore is safely ahead of Governor George W. Bush of Texas in presidential polls here. Gore's most striking endorsement came on a newspaper obituary page.
On Oct. 30, the children of Mary Frances Hallowell, who died at 89, included a line in her death notice in The Providence Journal that read, ''In lieu of flowers, please vote for Al Gore.''
Her son, James Mott Hallowell, said his mother was politically active, and the family put the endorsement in as a tribute. ''It's just a way of telling what she stood for,'' Hallowell said.
