The past 20 years have seen the Republican Party in South Carolina chalk up one triumph after another, until the state now is as reliable for the GOP as it once was for Democrats. But one prize has always eluded the party's grasp: the 5th District U.S. House seat occupied by John Spratt.

When Ralph Norman, a Rock Hill real estate developer and freshman state lawmaker who had been courted by Republican leaders as high as the White House, agreed last year to run, the party thought it had finally found its ideal candidate.

Officials said Norman, with national GOP help, would be able to raise the millions of dollars necessary to go on Charlotte television with ads that would reach the thousands of newcomers, many of them conservatives, pouring into northern York and Lancaster counties.

But with just two months left until Nov. 7, political observers say they have seen no evidence that Norman has made measurable headway against Spratt, who has defeated Republican opponents eight times since 1982, the year he first went to Congress.

"I'm not sure it's the right year," said Republican strategist Warren Tompkins of Columbia, who called Norman "one of the best candidates we've ever fielded."

Tompkins said, "The question is, can he overcome Spratt's incumbency and the national tide, which seems to be tending against the Republicans right now."

Spratt said his latest poll, conducted in mid-July by Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group of Washington, D.C., showed him leading Norman, about 60 percent to about 20 percent.

Norman would not discuss his own polling numbers. "I'm very happy with where I am; I wouldn't change a thing," he said. "This race is going to be very competitive."

A Norman win would be historic. No Republican has ever represented South Carolina's 5th District in Congress. Only twice before -- in 1898 and 1932 -- have the district's voters turned out an incumbent.

The contest has national implications as well. Political analysts say Republicans are in growing danger of losing their current 231-204 majority in the U.S. House. Democrats need to pick up only 15 seats to gain control for the first time in 12 years.

Tompkins, a regional chairman for President Bush's election campaigns in 2000 and 2004, said Spratt's seat is one of the relatively few opportunities that Republicans have to add a seat to their column.

He's a key member of the Democratic leadership in Congress -- the ranking minority member on the House Budget Committee, second-ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee and assistant to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Norman repeatedly contrasts what he calls his "hometown values" with the "San Francisco values" of Pelosi and other liberals who, he said, favor abortion and gay rights.

"People know who I am, what I stand for, and how I vote," he said. "They may or may not agree with it, but they recognize that I'm no liberal Democrat; I'm a centrist Democrat."

S.C. Attorney General Henry McMaster, a former chairman of the state Republican Party, said Norman is facing an uphill battle. He said, "Ralph is an excellent candidate, but John Spratt is an excellent candidate himself; people like him."

Norman, meanwhile, is pinning his hopes on voters new to the district. "It's a new day," he said, citing 25,000 new voters in York County since 2002.

Most of those newcomers are white, college-educated suburbanites who have moved into the county's northern tier as part of Charlotte's metropolitan growth, said Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University political science professor. "So the assumption, and it's probably right, is that those voters strongly tend Republican."

Don Malloy, 70, a retired Pentecostal minister, moved to York County from New Jersey four years ago. One morning last week, he was in the Starbucks in Baxter Village.

In Spratt's last race against a well-known GOP challenger, York County Council Chairman Carl Gullick in 2000, he carried York County by a paper-thin margin with 50.5 percent, although his support district-wide was 59 percent.

Attending a groundbreaking last week for a commercial center in Baxter Village, he said: "This population growth hasn't sprung up in the last two years; it's been going on for the last 10 years. And in the last several elections, I've done fairly well in York County. And I wasn't losing votes by the droves up here."

: "I was chosen for my position in the Democratic leadership because I represented the center. So the fact that I was picked was not because I was liberal; it was because I was not liberal."

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