When Tracy Mueller of McCandless attends her Bible study class these days, she has more on her mind than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Republican committeewoman likes to steer the conversation to George Walker Bush.

For Mueller, Bible class affords a golden opportunity to engage in political persuasion. She thinks it's where she can be the most effective in her advocacy for the president.

"Who better to believe than the people in your own church?" she said.

Mueller is executing a key component of the Bush campaign strategy to a T, whipping up enthusiasm among evangelical Christians for the re-election of the president.

The Bush campaign is determined to boost the voter turnout of religious-minded conservatives, believing that its success in doing so could spell the difference between victory and defeat in the Nov. 2 election.

"Bush cannot win without strong support from the evangelical Christians," said William Martin, a sociology professor at Rice University and an expert on religious conservatives. "That's a very solid base of his."

Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, claimed earlier this year that the turnout of conservative Christian voters in the 2000 election fell 4 million short of his projection. If that estimate is correct, it follows that the low turnout of evangelicals contributed to Bush's loss in battleground states as such Pennsylvania, which Democrat Al Gore won in 2000.

Rove has not explained how he arrived at the 4 million figure, but the message was unmistakable: The Bush campaign must do better this time around in drawing evangelicals to the polls. As a result, it is mounting a massive effort aimed at churches and churchgoers.

Surveys have shown that about a quarter of registered voters identify themselves as evangelicals or born-again Christians.

"Our job is to get them to the polls and to energize them," said Leslie Gromis-Baker, the regional coordinator for the Bush campaign in the mid-Atlantic states.

Republicans have reason to believe the factors that might have turned off religious conservative voters in 2000 have all but disappeared.

News reports about Bush's 1976 arrest for drunk driving, which surfaced just five days before the 2000 election, have faded from most people's memories. More important, the president, during 33 months in office, has bonded with religious conservative voters personally and through his policies, establishing himself as one of them.

"We are very encouraged that he is a praying president who seeks the guidance of God in his decisions," Mueller said. "We can't ask for anything more."

Bush, a born-again Christian, has talked publicly about his religious practices, at one point telling reporters, "I pray all the time. All the time."

He has endeared himself to the pro-life movement, signing a bill last year banning partial-birth abortions, and he has steered federal money for social services toward faith-based organizations. If his support among evangelicals needed any shoring up, he tended to that this year, pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

"The president is a strong man who has very strong beliefs and has the courage to stand up for what he believes is right," said state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, R-Cranberry, a religious conservative. "I think that will energize [evangelicals] to come out for the president this year in bigger numbers than they did in 2000."

Polling data confirms that Bush is enjoying greater support among such voters.

In a University of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey conducted in July, the president was viewed favorably by 71 percent of registered voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians. Four years earlier, 63 percent of such voters viewed Bush favorably.

For the Bush campaign, the object now is to make sure those Christians turn out to vote on Nov. 2 in greater numbers than they did in 2000.

And that's the tricky part.

U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania chairman of the Bush campaign, maintains that Republicans operate at a disadvantage in trying to reach their base.

"If you're a Democrat going into a ward in Philadelphia where 95 percent of the people are Democrats, it's a little easier," Santorum said. "Republicans, generally speaking, are much more diffuse."

But the Republicans have their ways.

The Bush campaign has organized volunteers into 31 coalitions, including one for "religious conservatives." And the Republican National Committee has an evangelical outreach coordinator: Drew Ryun, son of U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun, R-Kansas.

"One of the things we try to do is work through conservative organizations and work through people at their churches," Santorum said. "If you have a campaign volunteer who is active in their church, you make sure they're contacting other people at their church."

The nuts and bolts of the Bush strategy for reaching evangelical voters was laid bare this summer in a campaign memorandum that assigned 22 duties to church-going volunteers.

The first item: turn over church membership lists to the Bush campaign.

A pastor or other congregational official can jeopardize a church's tax-exempt status by giving a membership directory to a political candidate. And the same restrictions apply to anti-abortion groups and other nonprofit advocacy organizations.

Dorn Checkley, director of the Pittsburgh Coalition Against Pornography, furnished the Santorum campaign with a list of his organization's members in 1996. But he said he wouldn't do that again.

"As the director of a nonprofit advocacy organization, I'm very careful about my political involvement, because I don't want to get into tax trouble," he said.

But tax law does not expressly prohibit rank-and-file members from providing such a list.

Theresa Thomas, a Republican committeewoman in Franklin Park, obtained an extensive list of local anti-abortion voters during the 2000 presidential campaign.

"It's something I need to find because it would be worth utilizing again," said Thomas, a member of an anti-abortion task force organized by state Rep. Mike Turzai, R-Bradford Woods.

The Bush campaign memorandum also urges volunteers to distribute voter guides at their churches.

Several pro-life groups and evangelical organizations publish voter guides that compare the positions of candidates on such hot-button issues as abortion and gay marriage. Technically, such guides do not endorse a candidate, but they clearly steer readers toward Bush.

To reach evangelical voters, the Republican Party is also advertising on Christian radio stations and distributing targeted fliers.

One GOP radio commercial warns that "radicals are trying to uproot our traditional values."

"They're fighting to hijack the institution of marriage, plotting to legalize partial-birth abortion, working to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, and forcing the worst of Hollywood on the rest of America," the radio commercial states.

In a similar vein, the Republican Party has sent a mailer to voters in Arkansas and West Virginia warning that "liberals" want to ban the Bible. A more subdued flier paid for by the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania touts Bush as "a leader for our families and our values."

Much to the president's satisfaction, many religious conservatives are taking it upon themselves to campaign for him, often without marching orders from the Republican Party.

"The social conservatives tend to be much more politically active," Gromis-Baker said. "Often, they're the ones contacting us."

In addition to distributing Bush-friendly voter guides, numerous religious-conservative organizations have offered voter-registration links on their Web sites.

Evangelical leaders, at both the national and local levels, are trying to help Bush, too.

Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson created a spinoff political organization this year to rally support for the president and other social-conservative candidates. The Rev. Jerry Falwell has publicly predicted that evangelicals will turn out in record numbers on Election Day.

Tax laws prohibit pastors from endorsing candidates from the pulpit, but by sermonizing against abortion or gay marriage, they can imply a preference for the president.

"We encourage people to pray. We encourage people to vote," said Mt. Lebanon United Presbyterian Church pastor John Powell, who sports a Bush bumper sticker on his car.

Still, the Bush campaign faces some obstacles in courting evangelical Christians.

For one thing, not all evangelicals are Republicans. In the Annenberg poll, 22 percent identified themselves as Democrats.

And while Bush's stances on abortion and gay marriage appeal to conservative Christians, many of them are fretting about the death toll in Iraq and the sluggishness of the economy.

"There are so many other emotions and feelings coming into play, maybe some of the enthusiasm has been lost," said Thomas, the pro-life activist.

In Pennsylvania, Bush's courting of evangelicals has been further complicated by his support for the re-election of pro-choice U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in this spring's Republican primary. Social conservatives had vigorously backed the challenger, pro-life congressman Pat Toomey.

But in the aftermath of his loss to Specter, Toomey has helped to mend relations between his supporters and Bush, encouraging his backers to get behind the president.

"[Toomey supporters] were mad at the president on April 28, the day after the primary election. They were very upset," said William Green, a Republican political analyst in Pittsburgh. "But the reality is, they're going to vote for the president."

The Democrats, for their part, are doing nothing to specifically target evangelical voters, but they are distributing "People of Faith for Kerry-Edwards" buttons, T-shirts and bumper stickers.

And the Kerry campaign has circulated a "People of Faith Toolkit" that loosely resembles the Republicans' 22-duty memorandum. While the toolkit doesn't ask supporters to provide church-membership directories, it does urge them to hold potluck dinners with "family and friends in your faith community."