Columbia, S.C. -- Senator John McCain is well positioned in today's South Carolina Republican primary to strengthen his credentials as the de facto leader of the GOP establishment, but to do so he must fend off a populist white evangelical insurgency led by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, widely admired as an exceptionally skilled stump speaker.

McCain began the day ahead or tied in all but one of the last minute surveys of Republican voters here. But the wild card in this race is the unpredictable turnout level on this foul-weather Saturday -- rain and snow across the Palmetto state -- of the huge block of white evangelicals. These deeply religious voters have the numbers here, but not necessarily the unity, to give the financially strapped Huckabee a second win to reinforce his January 3 Iowa success. One of the last 15 state polls showed Huckabee ahead of McCain.

In past years, the South Carolina Republican primary has been a pivotal and often determinative event in the selection of a presidential nominee. This year, however, the South Carolina outcome is much less likely to clearly signal the winner at the Republican National Convention. Mitt Romney's victory today in the Nevada GOP caucuses ensures that the Republican contest will continue to Florida on January 29 and on into "Tsunami Tuesday" on February 5 when an unprecedented 22 states will hold caucuses and primaries.

Huckabee demonstrated his rhetorical talents at a gathering late Friday night here in Columbia, his last event before the polls opened this morning.

Joking that "in many ways, I'm like a lot of people in the United States: I'm a guy over 50 looking for a job," Huckabee went on to demonstrate that he stands alone among the Republican presidential candidates in addressing his message directly to the working and lower-middle class whites whose abandonment of the Democratic Party over the past four decades turned the GOP into the majority party across the South.

"If you are the guy in the corner office in a large company, [the economy] is probably doing great," Huckabee told the crowd. "But if you are the guy serving the food, the one driving the truck, if you are the one handling the bags -- quite frankly, you ask those folks, they tell you it's not so good -- because many of the people who work so hard, who are living from one paycheck to the next, who are literally one paycheck from not being able to pay the rent, one paycheck from not being able to pay for their kid who falls in the playground and breaks his arm, one paycheck from not being able to put gas in the truck -- for people who are struggling in the middle class, the economy has been a challenge."

While McCain most often appears in comfortable suburban venues with an armada of national and local figures -- Senators Lindsay Graham and Tom Coburn, Jack Kemp, state Attorney General Henry McMaster, state senator John Courson -- Huckabee is the first Republican candidate with 16-time World Wrestling Entertainment champion Ric "The Nature Boy" Flair as a warm-up speaker. Huckabee's advance men have shown a predilection for setting events at downscale barbecue restaurants.

Over the past month, Huckabee first surged in polls of South Carolina Republicans, from fifth place to, for a time, a solid first place. Over the past two weeks, however, he has fallen behind McCain, largely for two reasons: McCain got a major boost from his January 8 New Hampshire win, and the struggling campaign of Fred Thompson made a last ditch effort to get on track here. While well behind and tied for third place with Romney, Thompson did make gains, and the data suggest that virtually every point Thompson picked up came out of Huckabee's hide.

Thompson's appeal to Huckabee's voters, according to observers here, forced the former Arkansas Governor to shift from his own version of compassionate conservatism and to start using hard-line wedge issues such as the Confederate flag and immigration to win these voters back.

In addition to calling on "outsiders" to stop telling South Carolinians to take down the Confederate flag -- a symbol of racism to many black and some white voters -- Huckabee has sent out a mailer boasting of support from high-profile anti-immigration activist Jim Gilchrist: "Minuteman Founder Endorses Huckabee."

Many Republicans have avoided ties to either Gilchrist or to the various organizations claiming the title of Minutemen. Their armed border patrol activities prompted President Bush to declare, "I'm against vigilantes in the United States of America."

This admonition has not restrained Huckabee, for whom a win in the South Carolina primary is crucial to reviving his bid and accelerating the flow of cash to his financially strapped campaign.