EW ORLEANS - The South, often a political monolith with more than 100 electoral votes, appears to be reverting this fall to its role as a solidly Republican region.
After a decade in which Democrats penetrated parts of Dixie during President Clinton's campaigns, Republican George W. Bush of Texas appears to have a lock on almost every one of the 11 states that formed the old Confederacy.
As the candidates come down the stretch, Vice President Al Gore has been competing in only four states - Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, and his home base in Tennessee - and he has no assurance of winning any of them, his advisers concede privately.
''We feel pretty secure,'' said Mike Retzer, the GOP chairman in Mississippi, who is overseeing the Bush operation in five Southern states. ''Only two of my states are battlegrounds, and in them I feel better right now about Tennessee than Arkansas. Al Gore is just not resonating down here.''
While Clinton was able to claim five Southern states in each of the last two elections with a centrist ''New Democrat'' message, Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Atlanta, says: ''Gore has run as an old-style, fiery populist. ... He sounds like a class warrior whose views are too liberal for the South.''
There has been one surprising development as Bush, a conservative and a Texan, has built leads across the region: Gore is challenging the GOP for Florida's 25 electoral votes. Statewide polls published in the past few days gave Gore a narrow lead in one survey and Bush an advantage in another.
Gore enhanced his opportunities in the Sunshine State, which Clinton won in 1996, with his selection of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut as his running mate, a decision that excited the biggest concentration of Jewish residents outside New York. Gore's promise to strengthen Social Security and provide prescription drug coverage in Medicare programs also appealed to hundreds of thousands living in retirement in Florida.
Elsewhere in the region, Gore hopes to hold on to Tennessee and Arkansas, both of which voted for the Clinton-Gore ticket in 1992 and 1996. He has also campaigned twice in recent days in Louisiana, which was in the Democratic column in the past two elections.
But the situation in Louisiana reflects Gore's difficulties in the South. A poll released Thursday by the University of New Orleans gave Bush a 13-point lead among Louisiana voters considered most likely to go to the polls.
Gore's aides say they were lured into Louisiana by US Senator John Breaux, a popular Democrat who convinced them of an opening if they could attract a massive black vote. Gore raised about $500,000 in New Orleans on Oct. 20 at receptions hosted by Mayor Marc Morial, the dominant figure in a city where black political organizations are capable of delivering Democratic margins of more than 100,000.
''They're banking on that instead of spending money on TV,'' said Louisiana political analyst John Maginnis, referring to a Democratic investment in a get-out-the-vote effort among Louisiana blacks, who constitute 30 percent of the electorate. But Maginnis says he believes that Louisiana will be close ''only if the mood changes'' in the last 10 days.
Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew minimized Gore's efforts in Louisiana. ''It's a head fake,'' he said, suggesting that Gore's two recent visits to the Shreveport area in northern Louisiana were really designed to get TV news coverage in neighboring Arkansas, where Clinton's home state remains a tossup.
Gore is ignoring Texas and gave up early on Virginia, a strong Republican state. He also abandoned any pretense of conducting a serious campaign in the conservative Deep South belt of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, preferring to concentrate on an arc of heavily populated industrial states running from New Jersey through Wisconsin.
He has surrendered in North Carolina, a relatively liberal state the Democrats repeatedly have targeted yet failed to win.
Gore's problem in the South, said Ferrel Guillory, director of the program in Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at the University of North Carolina, is not so much an aversion to his agenda as a change in demographics.
''In such high-growth states as North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, what has happened is an expansion of the white middle and upper class,'' Guillory said. ''A lot of the people moving to the South are managers, middle managers, executives, and professionals - the kind of people that meet the profile of a typical Republican voter.''
The population shifts have helped alter the complexion of politics in the region. During the first half of the 20th century, it was known as the ''Solid South,'' a bastion of conservative Democrats who unanimously gave their allegiance to Democratic presidential candidates.
Republican Barry Goldwater, a fierce conservative, made the first inroads for his party in 1964, leading President Nixon to exploit racial divisions with a ''Southern strategy'' that cultivated white voters after Nixon's election in 1968. Except for Jimmy Carter's near-sweep of the region in 1976, the South served as a Republican stronghold in subsequent elections until the Clinton breakthrough of 1992.
