T. HELENA ISLAND, S.C. - One sparkling morning in the glory days just after his New Hampshire victory, a jubilant Senator John McCain stood on the steps of a grand antebellum mansion overlooking the salt marshes a few miles from here in Beaufort, telling of his greatest victory.
Better than winning on Feb. 1, he told his audience of 200, was drawing new voters to the polls, and, more importantly, to the Republican Party.
The only African-American in the audience that day was the Rev. Kenneth F. Hodges, pastor of the nearby Tabernacle Baptist Church, one of the country's oldest black churches, with a congregation of more than 500. Hodges happened to be reading the paper that morning and noticed that McCain would be appearing, so he caught the end of the Arizona senator's address.
But Hodges is still an Al Gore man.
''If a candidate is going to be down the street, and if I, as leader of one of the larger churches, don't know about it till I read it in that day's headlines, that tells me there's not a concerted effort to reach out to the minority community,'' Hodges said this week.
It has become the mantra of the McCain campaign, the ringing rationale for his candidacy: that his campaign can reform the Republican Party by broadening its base, remaking the GOP in the image of its great heroes: Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. The Arizona senator invokes all three presidents constantly.
But while Reagan's Republican Party might glisten tantalizingly on McCain's horizon, as he draws independents and Democrats to his cause, that of Lincoln remains well out of reach. Despite McCain's constant assertions that his candidacy typifies a new kind of inclusiveness and broad appeal, he concedes that he has done little to draw black voters - as much as 45 percent of the Democratic electorate by some estimates - into his new big tent. His rival George W. Bush has, if anything, done less.
''We've got a long way to go,'' McCain said in an interview aboard his campaign bus. ''A long way to go. I can't parachute into South Carolina in 19 days and say, `Everybody, here I am, all African-Americans flock to my banner.'''
Audiences at the candidates' town hall meetings and rallies are always overwhelmingly white. Sometimes, an audience of a thousand or more might include one or two blacks, but seldom more. Their absence is due to more than the candidates' sidestepping the Confederate flag flap, or flubbing questions of race on the hustings, though both contribute. The majority of African-American voters in South Carolina - almost 90 percent - have been wedded to the Democratic Party in national elections for decades, and remain so, `New South' or no.
The reasons for that are easy to find in places like St. Helena Island - just a few miles across the water, but a world apart, from bustling Beaufort. ''Most of the people from St. Helena Island, they've been here all their life,'' said Julius Green, 31, who is proprietor of Jus'Hair and Accessories and is black. ''My uncle and dad, and my mother, they're not going to even listen, they'll vote the straight ticket. [Republicans] ain't ever been for us, and that's what's instilled in the kids.''
''All my life I've been a Democrat,'' said Harold Washington, 59, a lifelong resident of the island, which is 65 percent black. ''The Democrats offered more to the African-Americans. Clinton does an outstanding job.''
It wasn't always this way. Especially not here on St. Helena Island, where enslaved blacks were formally freed in 1861, just six months into the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln made devout Republicans of Green's forbears.
By the 1950s African-American voters' support for the Republican Party had ebbed, as Democrats Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman had instituted programs to deal with some of the problems of the poor, who were disproportionately black, and the Democratic Party became associated with the nation's first, tentative steps toward civil rights protections.
The flight went both ways: In 1948, Strom Thurmond led conservative Democrats out of the party to protest Truman's concessions to the poor and minorities, and ran for president as a ''Dixiecrat.''
The steady trickle of voters away from each party, blacks from the Republicans and whites from the Democrats, became gushing torrents with the Civil Rights struggles of the early 1960s, when Martin Luther King Jr. met with colleagues to plot strategy on St. Helena Island. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, removing the literacy qualification for Southern black voters, thousands of African-Americans registered as Democrats.
And most of South Carolina's black voters, who numbered 300,000 of a total 1.1 million voters in the 1998 gubernatorial election, are stalwart party loyalists to this day.
''On the statewide level, blacks who do turn out give Democrats 80 or 90 percent of their votes,'' said Bruce Ransom, associate professor of political science at Clemson University. ''It's not unusual in a presidental race to see the Republican nominee get 7 or 8 percent of that vote.''
McCain hopes to break that pattern, though not through any direct appeal. Instead, he believes the broad issues he cares most about should resonate with African-Americans: better treatment of veterans, better opportunities for small businesses, better access to education and training, giving government back to ordinary Americans. He said his vision of ''a populist, reform Republican Party'' would draw ''the allegiance of a lot of people who are not normally Republican supporters, and that would include African-Americans.''
His vision finds admirers in a smattering of black voters.
''He experienced everything that came to us,'' said Danny C. Lindsay, of Rock Hill, S.C., a Vietnam veteran and former POW who was at McCain's town hall meeting in Fort Mill last weekend. ''He knows about the VA. I don't care if I'm the only African-American in this place. I feel the same way everybody in this place does.''
Charleston Police Chief Reuben Greenberg, who describes himself as both a Democrat and a conservative, has endorsed McCain.
''McCain has no association with any antiblack issues,'' said Greenberg, who is African-American. ''In national elections black voters are captors of the Democratic party. I'm not a captive of anybody.''
And there remains the possibility that if Democrats generally choose to participate in the GOP primary - which is open to all voters regardless of party - more blacks like Greenberg will join in. Earlier this week, federal judges ordered the state GOP to open polling places it has kept closed in recent years, many of which are in predominantly black districts.
These are districts that, in many cases, have not been remade in the mold of the vaunted `New South.' In recent years, industry and northern immigrants have flooded the region, and South Carolina has been no exception. In 1992, BMW opened a factory here that makes Z3 roadsters, and auto accessories manufacturers soon followed. Beaufort is the New South in a nutshell: McCain's host that morning after the primary was its mayor, Bill Rauch, and, like many Beaufort County residents, a transplant from the liberal northeast - a former press secretary to New York City Mayor Ed Koch.
Meanwhile, life on St. Helena Island hasn't budged much, and neither have most of its residents.
''I'll base my decision on how I was brought up,'' Green said. ''The South is more heritage than education. Surviving on our land and fishing and working the river. Ain't no big buildings round here, no BMW factories down here.''
McCain recognizes the desirability of pressing his appeal beyond the state's newly prosperous sections, and its white majority.
He cited his long history of seeking to improve relations with the Hispanic community in Arizona as evidence that he could win the trust of minority voters. In 1998, after 15 years in the Congress, he finally received a majority - 52 percent - of Hispanic votes in his home state. Bush, too, touts his success with Hispanic voters: Every day, he says, ''I'm a uniter, not a divider.'' In 1998, he garnered 49 percent of their votes.
But if black voters are slow to warm to the Republican cause, neither Bush nor McCain has stepped forward to embrace them, either, said many observers. Instead, they have been cautious, to avoid alienating conservative white voters.
Neither of them has taken a position on the Confederate flag issue in South Carolina, except to say that it is a matter for the state to decide.
Both have said they support the idea of affirmative action, but not quotas. And both have pilloried Clinton, who still enjoys extremely high approval ratings among black voters here.
McCain said he had consultants on black communities in Washington, but that he had not set up an outreach organization for black communities in South Carolina. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said the same for the Texas governor. And that annoys Hodges, the Beaufort pastor.
''African-American voters are concerned about the same issues as others,'' Hodges said. ''But they need to be in the audience, in the room to hear [what a candidate will do about] it.''
Incidents like the one at a Bush town hall meeting on Tuesday only reinforce the image of the GOP as disconnected from black voters. There, the Rev. Samuel T. Ross-Lee, pastor of Gill Creek Baptist Church in Columbia, rose to ask a question about the Confederate flag. Ross-Lee is African-American.
Bush's response was to ask Ross-Lee if he was with the news media. When Ross-Lee pursued his question, he was booed and made to sit down by other audience members.
''I'm not asking him to take the flag down,'' an angry Ross-Lee said afterward. ''I'm asking him to take a stand.''
''One of the reasons the Republicans don't have the kinds of votes they want from the black community is because they make assumptions,'' he said. ''The governor makes the assumption that a black man in a suit in a crowd of white people must be a reporter.''
Some black voters are tuning into the Republican contest anyway.
''I like John McCain,'' Harold Washington said. ''He's got a good point. I don't think Bush is ready for president. You want to know who the next president is? Bill Bradley. But if I were to vote for a Republican, I'd vote for McCain, because McCain is real.''
But Washington hastened to add that all of this was purely academic: ''I ain't no Republican, now!''
Anne E. Kornblut of the Globe Staff contributed to this story.
