ANOVER, N.H. - Bill McCann is trying to decide whom to support for president. He has met with Vice President Al Gore twice and he hopes to talk to former senator Bill Bradley, too. Representatives of both candidates have contacted him as well.
''I'm still listening,'' said McCann, the vice chair of the Dover school board and manager of the Somersworth liquor store. ''I don't want to sit on the sidelines, but it's a tough call.''
McCann may be one of the last of a breed, reminiscent of that well-worn joke in which a crusty voter can't make up his mind because he has only met the candidate three times.
According to a study by political scientists at Dartmouth College, the New Hampshire tradition of one-to-one contact between voters and presidential candidates is more folk wisdom than fact.
Using data collected during the 1996 presidential primary, the Dartmouth study said that only 2.5 percent of the voters received three or more contacts from any candidate.
The contacts encompassed meeting the candidate, seeing the candidate at a rally, receiving a phone call from a campaign, or receiving a candidate's literature in the mail.
''New Hampshire voters get their information from the same place as everybody else,'' said Dean Spiliotes, one of the co-authors of the study.
''Sitting in their living rooms watching television with news stories of candidates meeting voters in their own hometown.''
Based on the 1996 data, Spiliotes said voters were not meeting candidates in order to learn about them. Rather, voters who went to a rally or met a candidate at a house party were already favorably inclined to support that person.
Whether the contacts between voters and candidates will increase in 2000 with the advent of e-mail remains to be seen.
The state's political leaders have long promoted the notion that New Hampshire is the only state besides Iowa where candidates can spread their message from one home to another before small crowds of neighbors in charming hamlets and villages.
But while all candidates say how important this style of campaigning is, not all of them are practicing it. Texas Governor George W. Bush, for example, may be the Republican front-runner, but he has only been to New Hampshire three times this year and none of his trips included any house parties.
Elizabeth Dole, on the other hand, has been working the state hard, but she committed a faux pas recently on the heels of her strong showing in the Iowa straw poll. At the Manchester Rotary Club, Dole showed up late, spoke briefly, only took three questions from the audience and then dashed out without shaking hands with each of the 60 members in attendance in order to talk to a television reporter from WNDS-TV.
Nevertheless, proponents of the New Hampshire primary would rather focus on the interaction with voters that does occur. Trying to prevent other states from encroaching on the state's first-in-the-nation primary status, Governor Jeanne Shaheen pointed to the voters' direct contact with politicians and said that style of campaigning is unavailable in other states, where candidates must pay millions of dollars in television advertising to circulate their message.
''This simply isn't possible in most places,'' Shaheen said at a news conference in December. ''The opportunity for personal, retail campaigning is lost in larger states, where campaigns are played out in television commercials and on airport tarmacs.''
Still, Karen MacNair of Portsmouth may be more typical of voters these days. Unlike Bill McCann, she has never met with a presidential candidate, and she has never attended a house party to listen to a presidential candidate's ideas. In fact, MacNair had never met a presidential candidate until she tried to go to the post office on a recent Friday.
What she found were the roads blocked off and the area crawling with Secret Service agents. So MacNair stood in front of the Portsmouth Brewery and waited to shake hands with Al Gore, who was walking down the street.
Hadley Reid, on the other hand, has met four presidential candidates: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George Bush, and most recently, Gore.
''I went to places where I knew they were going to be,'' said Reid, who lives in Dover and works as a temporary office worker. After meeting the vice president in Portsmouth recently, Reid said she expects to vote for him. ''I was a little in awe,'' she said.
The voters of New Hampshire have had an impressive track record in picking winners. Since 1952, only one person has lost the New Hampshire primary and gone on to be elected president - Bill Clinton in 1992.
The state has long played a role in winnowing the list of candidates who run for president, and it has also been known for toppling front-running candidates.
Nevertheless, television footage of candidates sitting and talking to families at their kitchen table is more photo opportunity than reality.
''If Bill Bradley comes to Dunkin' Donuts in West Lebanon and no one was there to cover it, was he ever there at all?'' Spiliotes asked, suggesting that candidates primarily go out to meet voters in order to get on television, so that other voters see them interacting with their neighbors.
According to the survey, the majority of New Hampshire voters had no contact whatsoever with any presidential campaign between October of 1995 and Feb. 15, 1996.
Fifty-six percent of the voters never received a phone call, a mailing or a handshake from a candidate. Twenty-nine percent said they had only one contact with a campaign.
Still, the voters here had more contact than voters in the rest of the country.
Just under 20 percent of the New Hampshire voters surveyed met a candidate or attended a rally. By contrast, 6 percent of the voters nationwide ever met a candidate or attended a rally.
The authors said that given the state's reputation, they expected New Hampshire voters to have far greater one-on-one contact with the candidates.
