e's created such a following that they have a name: McCainiacs, a bloc of voters so drawn to John McCain's life story and his vow to uproot Washington's special interests that they have set aside personal ideology - theirs and his - to make the McCain campaign plausible.
Yet today, the McCain rocket that soared heavenward with his startling triumph in New Hampshire may, if current polls hold, tumble back toward Earth. In another week, as happens almost every four years around this time, a delegate majority is likely to trump the euphoria of February's insurgency.
But if that comes to pass, and the two establishment favorites who began the year as front-runners become the nominees, what is to become of the patchwork coalition of left-thinking and right-leaning McCainiacs? Where do the long-time voters disenchanted with the institutional favorites turn? Or the first-time voters who were attracted to McCain? And is there a home for the dwindling band of Bill Bradley supporters?
By most estimates, the next eight months of sharp debate between Democratic and Republican Party nominees will probably drive most of them to one side or the other. Or they might follow the example of millions of others: Avoid the polls on Election Day.
Even so, a new national poll suggests that McCain, like Ross Perot in 1992, would start with a substantial base of support if he decided to mount a third party challenge for the White House. And that has been enough to create a political buzz over whether the unpredictable McCain might find a way to become a plausible alternative yet again.
McCain has said he would ''never'' take such a step. In the end, despite Texan George W. Bush's attempts to portray him as a liberal outrider, McCain may be too reflexively Republican to bolt the GOP. And if he did, such a challenge would more likely mimic the quixotic effort mounted in 1980 by John B. Anderson than the ever-so-brief promise of Perot's rebellion, according to political strategists who have mulled over the issue.
To be credible, they say, a third-party challenge must be mounted by an outsider; McCain made his political name in Washington. Its appeal must be based on issues; McCain's allure has been personality and biography. And to succeed, it must tap into a national mood of discontent strong enough to prompt voters to radically alter the American political system.
What discontent? ''This is the politics of contentment. We're too fat and sassy. The country is prosperous and at peace,'' said Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution. ''You only get serious third-party challenges when there's a national itch that needs scratching. And we do not have that.''
And yet, McCain surely tapped into something. His primary campaign energized many of the same rootless voters who found Perot inspiring in 1992. ''Even as much as he has damaged himself with Republicans, John McCain appealed to and got the Perot constituency. There is no question that he would be formidable if he ran as a third-party candidate,'' said Donald J. Devine, a veteran of several presidential campaigns and one of the conservative strategists who helped Ronald Reagan win in 1980.
To others, McCain's success with Perot's voters is testimony to the disarray within the Reform Party that Perot launched. The party is so riven by dissent that its brightest star, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, quit in disgust. Even Donald Trump decided against seeking its nomination. And some of the Perotistas are so alarmed by Patrick J. Buchanan that they want to draft Perot rather than risk having Buchanan carry their banner in November.
That internecine squabble, by itself, may well be enough to deter McCain. Pat Choate, the Reform Party chairman, said in an interview that if McCain decides to mount a general election campaign, he'd be better off striking off on his own. But that would present McCain with enormous ballot access challenges.
While others agree with Hess's view that voters are too content with the economy to propel a third-party candidate to victory, they nonetheless say there is evidence that, for now, voters are not enthusiastic about either Gore or Bush.
''George Bush is a significantly weaker candidate now than we believed him to be in December. And yet he still beats Gore in general election polls. Why? Because Al Gore is an even weaker candidate,'' said John Buckley, who held senior positions in three of the four previous GOP presidential campaigns.
Not surprisingly, that sentiment shows up in the Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll of 1,213 adults that sought to gauge the strength of a McCain third-party challenge. It showed McCain with 24 percent of the vote, to 34 percent for Bush and 33 percent for Gore.
Thomas E. Patterson, a political scientist who directs the Vanishing Voter project at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, said that beyond McCain's personal appeal, ''he's tapped into a sense that our politics is not working very well.''
Patterson said that in a new poll just completed by the Vanishing Voter project, nearly three out of every four people agree with the statement that politics in America is ''pretty disgusting.''
Despite the promise for McCain hinted at in the polls, some suggest that political reality would soon set in if he were to persist in a third-party role. If Bush sweeps most of the states that vote today and next Tuesday, as many analysts expect, McCain's allure would diminish, and so would his poll numbers.
Thomas D. Rath, a GOP national committeeman from New Hampshire who supports Bush, said McCain's appeal ''has been driven much more by his character, his life story and his personality than by... the issues.''
If there were to be a general election matchup among the three, Rath said, ''and you said to these liberal supporters of John McCain, `Do you really want a president who is pro-life and pro-gun,' they would probably say, `No, not that much.'''
