A harvest-time feel in N.Y.

SYRACUSE, N.Y. —  On a drizzly afternoon here late last week, former President Clinton attracted more than 400 enthusiastic activists, seven television cameras and reporters from across New York’s southern tier to a raucous rally for Democratic congressional and state legislative candidates.

On the same day, John Spencer, the Republican candidate for the Senate seat now held by Clinton’s wife, slipped into and out of the city with little notice. After a local company barred Spencer from using its facility for a news conference about the economy, he was reduced to addressing a handful of reporters “beneath the canopy of an abandoned gas station,” the Syracuse Post-Standard reported.

So it goes this year for the two major parties in the nation’s third most-populous state. In an election season that seems certain to produce Democratic gains around the country, New York may provide the party with the most resounding victories.

Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton, the incumbent senator, and Eliot Spitzer, the state attorney general now running for governor, are cruising toward landslides over underfunded, little-known Republicans who have been virtually abandoned by the state and national GOP.

“I think it’s going to be a mirror image of [the Republican landslide] in 1994, where the Democrats basically sweep the state,” said Rob Ryan, Spencer’s communications director and a veteran GOP operative.

Dan Maffei, who is running against GOP Rep. James T. Walsh in Syracuse, puts the prospect more colorfully: For New York Democrats, he said, the story this year “really can be ‘The Empire State strikes back.’ ”

With so little doubt about the top of the ticket, the crucial question is whether the Democratic tide will be strong enough to help Maffei and other challengers capture any of the six GOP House seats across upstate New York that Democrats are contesting aggressively.

“The opportunity is there for us,” Sen. Clinton said after she spoke at a fundraising lunch for Maffei, a former Capitol Hill aide.

Converting that opportunity won’t be easy against incumbents who have entrenched themselves by diligent constituent service in districts that almost all lean toward the GOP. But Republicans Walsh, John E. Sweeney and Thomas M. Reynolds may need every bit of that goodwill to survive in a year when state and national political trends are against them.

“There is no cover being offered by the president, the war or the top of the ticket in New York,” said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the independent Marist Poll at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. “There is no cover for any of these people. They are out there on their own.”

The decline of the Republican Party in New York is a story both epic and shabby, like a tabloid tale of a wealthy family that generation by generation slowly goes to seed.

The New York GOP once produced titans of Republican moderation such as Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and Sen. Jacob K. Javits; it has held the majority in the state Senate since 1966. In 1994, Republican George E. Pataki was elected to the first of his three terms as governor; he is retiring this year.

But forces internal and external have corroded the party’s foundations. Many critics say that Pataki, and former GOP Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato before him, focused more on rewarding supporters than on building a strong organization. “There was no sense of a state party,” said historian Fred Siegel, who has written extensively on New York politics. “It was a party for people who were connected.”

Tensions between moderates and conservatives have compounded the problems. Party leaders, for instance, initially recruited William F. Weld, a former Massachusetts governor who had moved to New York, as their preferred candidate against Spitzer. But delegates at the state party convention in June rejected Weld, who supports legal abortion, for John Faso, a much more conservative former state Assembly member who opposes abortion rights.

Pataki is leaving office with a weak approval rating, grumbling by conservatives over rising spending, and a sense among many New Yorkers that the state has drifted in recent years. Spitzer has seized on that sentiment with a muscular campaign slogan that dramatizes his confidence and the expectations he’ll confront if he wins: “Day One: Everything Changes.”

Looming over these local factors is the regional realignment of the GOP, which has lost strength across the Northeast as it has become more closely identified with Southern-flavored social conservatism.

“The national Republican Party defines the environment as much as anything else, and the conscious decision of the Bush White House to polarize the country on an ideological basis, and in part even on religious affiliation, has done tremendous damage to ... Republicans in New York,” said one veteran state GOP strategist who asked not to be identified while criticizing White House strategy.

In key statewide contests this year, the GOP has hit bottom: A mid-October Marist Poll put Spitzer over Faso by a ratio of more than 3 to 1; Clinton led Spencer, the former mayor of Yonkers, by more than 2 to 1. Andrew Cuomo, the son of former Democratic Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, has a commanding lead in the race for state attorney general. Only a scandal engulfing Democratic state Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi over his use of a state employee to chauffeur his wife offers Republicans the chance of a statewide win.

With their own campaigns secure, Clinton and Spitzer will use these final days for a joint unity tour through several contested districts, helping Democratic House candidates raise money and attract attention.

Democrats, who already hold 20 of the state’s 29 House seats, are most optimistic about picking up the seat of retiring Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a Republican moderate who since 1983 has represented the district centered on the economically struggling small city of Utica. Central New York is traditionally Republican country, but Democratic officials believe that their candidate, Oneida County Dist. Atty. Michael A. Arcuri, has established an edge over GOP state Sen. Ray Meier.

The National Republican Congressional Committee has battered Arcuri with ads criticizing his record as district attorney, but he has run an energetic, populist race, calling for an early withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and tariffs on imports from low-wage competitors such as China.

“I get a feeling this is going to be one of those watershed years where you see things change,” Arcuri said as he campaigned in his childhood neighborhood in Utica on a chilly afternoon.

Democrats also are pressing serious challenges (including advertising from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) against Walsh in Syracuse; Sweeney in a district around Albany; and Reynolds in Buffalo, though Reynolds appears to be recovering after slipping because of controversy over his role in the House page sex scandal. If the wave grows high enough, it could endanger GOP Reps. Sue W. Kelly and John R. “Randy” Kuhl Jr.

In their struggle to survive, these Republicans have three principal assets. One is the composition of their districts -- all but Walsh’s lean toward the GOP. With Republicans controlling the House for the last decade, all have delivered tangible benefits for their communities. And historically, the GOP’s get-out-the-vote organization in upstate New York has been better than the Democrats’.

But GOP activists fret that all that might not be enough for at least some incumbents if Republicans and conservatives, discouraged by the impending routs at the top of the ticket, stay home election day.

“Politics is like the ocean: The tide comes in, the tide goes out,” said Michael R. Long, chairman of the powerful state Conservative Party, which is closely allied with the New York GOP. “But if this pans out the way it is looking, we have years of reconstruction to get back into the game again.”

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ronald.brownstein@latimes.com