ILLISTON, S.C. - Rivers Pharmacy's big green awning shades huge plate-glass windows that look out on a sleepy Main Street.
Inside, pine floors yellow with age run under displays of school supplies, cosmetics, and notions to a back counter where Tommy Rivers, pharmacist and mayor, presides over the town's pills and politics.
Overhead, a dozen fans push heat down from two-story ceilings, warming the knights of the long table, Williston's principal civic forum, against a chilly South Carolina winter.
Williston, population 3,300, is no holdover from an earlier time. As in many South Carolina towns, industry long ago replaced agriculture as the foundation of the economy, and the people who gather around the Formica table these days to discuss the Republican presidential race are factory workers, military personnel, nuclear-plant employees, and retirees from professional jobs.
Here and everywhere in this solidly Republican corner of the state, George W. Bush and his backers are pushing major tax cuts and more military spending, ideas that have served Republican candidates well at least since the first election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. To their dismay, they are not getting the answers that they expect, answers Bush may need if he is to win here on Saturday.
There is still time for anything to happen, and some recent polls show Bush's support strengthening, but a buzz is rising, in breakfast shops, in taverns, on the streets: McCain could win.
Bush's supporters are rallying.
''Let's get on board now and vote for a guy's gonna win, '' Frank Mizell, manager of First Citizens Bank and active Bush enthusiast, implored one afternoon last week. ''Vote for John McCain, you're throwing your vote away.''
Gene Thomas, who used to truck nuclear waste from all over the country to be buried in nearby Barnwell County, demurred. ''I believe McCain's going to take South Carolina,'' he said. ''I do too,'' chimed in Norman Folk, a grizzled 79-year-old whose hat advertised a passion for bass fishing.
''Norman, wouldn't you like to have a tax refund?'' Mizell asked, playing a card that Bush and his strategists believe is one of their most potent.
''No,'' Folk said firmly, eliciting a look of shock from the banker. ''Somebody'd just figure a way to get it back from me.''
Folk, and others around the table, almost all of whom plan to vote in the Republican primary, said they were impressed with McCain's promise to strengthen the Social Security system and pay down the national debt, even though that would mean a smaller tax cut.
''Thank you Jesus for the Savannah River Site,'' cried the now nearly frantic Mizell, turning the group's attention to the vast hunk of Barnwell County where the federal government manufactures nuclear weapons and employs 14,000 people - down about 10,000 since the end of the Cold War. ''I pray McCain doesn't think he can get in there and do more for less.''
Again, the likely Republican voters around the table were not buying Mizell's message. McCain ''knows what the military does, he knows where the money goes,'' said Thurman Eichman, a retired submarine commander. ''I trust him.''
There is still plenty of time for things to change before the balloting, but right now, at least in this corner of the state, there are echoes of McCain's surprisingly strong New Hampshire victory in the wind.
To the south, in Barnwell, David Cannon, cochairman of the county's Bush campaign, says with the same sort of complacency that Bush backers once had in New Hampshire, that the Texas governor's activists here are not worried. ''It's kind of relaxed,'' he said. ''We're just keeping our connections going. I don't think Bush is going to have a lot of problems with Barnwell County.''
A bit to the north in Aiken, where Senator Strom Thurmond maintains a house and a reputation as a demigod, attorney Elmer Hatcher, an intimate friend of the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, said he is still undecided and inactive, but predicted with beady-eyed certainty that McCain will win the state.
''There's a lot more people at his events, and a lot more excitement,'' Hatcher said. He also stressed that, while South Carolina is solidly Republican now, its electorate also has a populist character and a working-class character much as it did when the state was part of a solidly Democratic South.
''Not long ago, the blue-collar workers voted in the Democratic primary. Now they vote in the Republican primary,'' Hatcher said. ''They don't care so much what's good for the Republican Party. They want someone who thinks like them.''
Generally, in conversations here, professional people in their 30s and 40s are the ones who seem most inclined to support Bush, and almost invariably they cite a desire for the maximum possible tax cut as the main reason. They also express admiration for Bush's father and doubt about McCain's electability in a final election showdown they presume will be with Vice President Al Gore, whom they loathe.
''I like the military end of McCain, the prisoner of war record, but don't think he has a chance of winning the national election,'' said Monty Davis, 42, a mountain of a man who teaches physics and chemistry at Williston-Elko High School.
''I like what Bush stands for,'' Davis said as he wedged his massive frame into a chair at the end of the long table in Williston. ''He stands for what his father stands for. ... I don't like what McCain is going to do with the tax surplus. I do like what Bush says.''
Kia Valentine, 36, who's resigning from her job as a language arts teacher in the Barnwell schools so she can home-school her three daughters, said she is leaning strongly toward Bush because he represents traditional values. She was stumped for a moment when asked why she thought that about him, then she said it was ''based on his father's views of education - that more so than money, family and prayer will help.
Down the road in Barnwell, the county seat, Michael Raley, 35, who is the county tax collector and Republican Party treasurer, said he has flipped back and forth a few times and now is ''leaning toward Bush pretty strongly,'' mainly on the basis of the governor's tax-cut proposal.
But, Raley said, he is seeing great interest in McCain among younger people in the party, ''the people we usually would be concerned might be drawn toward Democrats ....
Also, you're going from one extreme to the other from Clinton to McCain,'' Raley said. ''George Bush sort of has a playboy image. You see him on jet skis, snowmobiles, there's that possible drug use - people might tie that in with Clintonesque free-going, where McCain is serious all the time.''
Imagery as conveyed in the candidates' paid advertising looms much larger in people's minds here than it did in New Hampshire, where many more people saw Bush and McCain in person. This is a battle even staunch Bush loyalists said he is losing.
''McCain has run a slick commercial showing him returning from the prisoner of war camp, that's what's really what's ringing peoples' bell here,'' said Mizell, the Williston banker. ''I wish Bush could be captured and held somewhere for a while. We could turn this thing around quick.''
In Barnwell, after viewing the latest campaign ads on a VCR at the public library, Bush cochairman Cannon said his candidate would win the war of attack ads that broke out last week, in part because ''people I know, when we think of Bush, we put the whole family together, and when you attack Bush it's like attacking his father.''
But he expressed disappointment with the overall quality of the Bush ads now blanketing the state.
''I see more of Bush's ads on TV,'' Cannon said, ''but I am not impressed with them like I wanted to be.''
''Jesus Christ!'' blurted head librarian Ellen Jenkins, who was otherwise the epitome of a soft-spoken, primly groomed Southern grandmother, on viewing a McCain ad likening Bush's alleged untruthfulness to President Clinton's. A Bush supporter, Jenkins remembers when the candidate's great-grandfather, George Herbert Walker, owned a plantation here and walked the streets in jodhpurs.
''That ad is a negative for McCain, it's too much,'' she said. But then she slipped into the near reverie to which many South Carolinians seem susceptible when they think about McCain.
''I couldn't have done that,'' she said, as the discussion turned to ads highlighting McCain's prisoner-of-war experiences. ''It shows courage and strength, and that's important.''
