FREMONT, N.H. -- At first glance, in his crisp khakis and blue checked, button-down shirt, Mitt Romney looked a little out of place amid the tattoos, piercings and camo attire abounding at the annual "grass drags."

That's the sport where snowmobiles race one another on drag strips of wet grass and mud, reaching speeds above 100 miles an hour. On a recent Saturday, one of the last really warm days of the fall, thousands turned out to revel in the deafening spectacle. Mr. Romney did his best to fit in.

With his salesman-of-the-year smile, he moved through the crowd, chatting about last night's Sox win, guessing kids' ages and comparing notes on the relative merits of Ski-Doo watercraft.

As he stood by the bales of hay that separated spectators from the roaring snowmobiles, Mr. Romney stooped down to chat with a young boy who showed no sign of recognizing him.

"You just shook hands with the next president of the United States," an older man said as he led the boy away.

Score the exchange one more tiny victory for a man whose life has been an almost unbroken winning streak.

To extend that streak to the White House, the former Massachusetts governor is counting on his New Hampshire neighbors, along with voters in Iowa, to catapult him past the Republican candidates ahead of him in national polls.

To that end, he has spent more time and money in the two gatekeeper states than any other Republican. So far, the first part of his strategy is working. In contrast to his national numbers, Mr. Romney is ahead in both states.

"From an organizational standpoint, we're significantly ahead of where we've been in the past," said Tom Rath, a respected member of the state's GOP establishment and a senior Romney adviser. "He's been here and that's a huge advantage for us, but no one is going to break out."

His organizational strength and his similarly extensive television advertising are also paying off in Iowa, with a consistent polling lead complementing a summer victory in the state's unscientific but closely watched GOP straw poll.

To win the nomination he needs to maintain those leads and to win over conservative activists skeptical of his relatively late embrace of shared positions on key social issues. That challenge is compounded by the reservations held by some Christian conservatives and others about the Mormon faith.

In September, one Gallup Poll found that 66 percent of Americans said the country was not ready for a Mormon president. Belying such statistics, Mr. Romney has made significant inroads among Christian conservative leaders.

Although Mr. Romney's national numbers have been heading up through the fall, he's still well behind the GOP leader, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. An average compiled by the Web site Pollster.com, put Mr. Giuliani at 31 percent, followed by former Tennessee Sen. Fred D. Thompson at 16 percent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona at 15 percent, Mr. Romney at 12 percent and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, 7.8 percent.

But the Iowa and New Hampshire numbers are very different. In the Hawkeye State, Mr. Romney is well ahead. The Pollster.com aggregate puts his support at 27 percent. His closest rival is Mr. Huckabee at 14.8 percent. In New Hampshire, where Mr. Romney owns a lakeside vacation home, it's more competitive, but Mr. Romney is still in first, at 29 percent, followed by Mr Giuliani's average strength of 21.4 percent.

And two polls released in the past week show Mr. Romney padding his lead in New Hampshire after months in which Mr. Giuliani appeared to be closing the gap. A Marist Poll to be published today showed Mr. Romney at 33 percent among likely Republican voters compared with 22 percent for Mr. Giuliani and 13 percent for Mr. McCain.

The competition between Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Romney is a battle of strategies as well as candidates. The former mayor, while contending in New Hampshire, is running more of a national campaign, already posting leads in states across the country. Mr. Romney, by contrast, is counting on success in the early states to elevate him to national contention.

Mr. Rath argues that a competitive race in New Hampshire is a good thing for his candidate, because the perception that it is a true fight, rather than a gimme in the candidate's back yard, will make a win there more significant.

Problem-solver approach

A child of affluence -- his late father, George, was the former Michigan governor and American Motors president -- Mr. Romney graduated from Brigham Young University after spending two years as a missionary in France, then went east to Harvard, pursuing a joint program at its law and business schools. He emerged near the top of both his MBA and law school classes.

He went on to earn a fortune in his own right as a business consultant and later as the head of a venture capital firm. He balanced the demands of those roles as he nurtured his church in Massachusetts, rising to the Mormon equivalent of bishop.

He ran against Sen Edward M. Kennedy in 1994, a good year for Republicans across the country. It was the year that the GOP won control of the U.S. House for the first time in decades. In Pennsylvania, a young Republican congressman named Rick Santorum won a stunning upset over Sen. Harris Wofford. But the Republican tide didn't reach Massachusetts.

The veteran Democrat clobbered the fresh-faced businessman. The business successes that had made Mr. Romney's reputation and fortune were leveraged against him in that race, as Mr. Kennedy aired a devastating television commercial featuring workers laid off at one of the firms that Mr. Romney's investment company had acquired and turned around.

After a return to the business world, Mr. Romney burnished his public reputation during a widely hailed tenure as the chief executive officer of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

That proved a springboard to his triumphant return to Massachusetts as a successful candidate for governor. He brought to the statehouse his business-honed, problem-solving approach. Among his signal achievements was a complex plan to extend health insurance to every state resident.

Its enactment brought national attention and generally positive reviews, but Mr. Romney now soft-pedals the measure. Rather than holding it out as a national model, he argues to the conservative constituency he now courts that the national government shouldn't place all its bets on any one health care model. Rather, he says, the 50 states should be laboratories for varying health care experiments.

The issue speaks to one of the central challenges of the Romney candidacy. If the presidential race were about competence, not ideology, Mr. Romney would be able to make a strong case for himself and his golden resume. But, in his efforts to appeal to Republicans for whom a strongly conservative ideology is important, he has faced heavy challenges.

His Senate loss is not a burden in and of itself, but the positions he adopted in that race and in his run for governor in trying to appeal to the relatively liberal Bay State electorate are a problem for many committed conservatives. As a Massachusetts candidate, he pledged to uphold abortion rights and robustly defend the rights of gay citizens, statements anathema to many conservatives.

If he was looking for help in rehabilitating his credentials as a social conservative, the Massachusetts Supreme Court gave it to him with its ruling in 2004 upholding gay marriage. Mr. Romney was an outspoken critic of the ruling. In affirming his now strongly pro-life position, Mr. Romney tells his audiences that his views followed the same evolution as other once pro-choice Republicans such as former President Ronald Reagan and former U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill.

At one of his frequent "Ask Mitt Anything" town meetings recently, one questioner confronted the candidate on a report that his wife had been a contributor to Planned Parenthood.

"I and my family do not support Planned Parenthood," he said, surrounded by the committed and the curious in a middle school hall in Milford, N.H. "But we found when we were going through old checks ... a check from my wife to Planned Parenthood several years ago. My wife is as pro-life as they come; how that happened, I don't know. Whether some friend asked her to give, I don't know."

Ideological evolution?

The issue of Mr. Romney's ideological evolution (or flip-flops, depending on who's judging) was put starkly last month by former White House counselor Dan Bartlett in a speech first reported in the Washington Post.

"He's getting a narrative in the national media as somebody that is too much trying to position himself, trying to hedge himself, almost too mechanical about the issues," the article quoted Mr. Bartlett as saying. "Authenticity is going to be a very important principle in this campaign. And right now that's their biggest danger."

The former Bush campaign strategist was quoted further as saying the issue would also serve as a smokescreen for other concerns that some would be less comfortable acknowledging.

"The Mormon issue is a real problem in the South, it's a real problem in other parts of the country," he said. "But people are not going to say it. People are not going to step out and say, 'I have a problem with Romney because he's Mormon.' What they're going to say is he's a flip-flopper."

The campaign's efforts to deal with the issue were on display in a Washington ballroom on another fall Saturday. Mr. Romney was in Washington to address the Values Voters Summit, a gathering of thousands of activist religious conservatives, at least some of whom regard Mormonism as a cult.

"The values of my faith are identical to the values of other faiths that have the Judeo-Christian philosophical background," he told reporters after another "Ask Mitt Anything" session. "They're American values, if you will."

Showing organizational prowess reminiscent of his straw poll victory in Iowa, his campaign offered another rebuttal to those who argued that evangelical Christians would resist his candidacy. Mr. Romney was the clear winner of a straw poll conducted in conjunction with the conference, a win that depended overwhelmingly on call-in votes rather than the balloting conducted among those who heard the GOP candidates speak.

In recent weeks, the campaign has also showcased a brace of endorsements from Christian Conservative luminaries, including Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Christian Coalition. Earlier, Bob Jones III, the chancellor of Bob Jones University, was a surprise addition to the Romney camp. Despite his fundamentalist school's past denunciations of Mormonism, along with Catholicism, he explained his endorsement with the rhetorical questions:

"What is the alternative? Hillary's lack of religion or an erroneous religion?"

Mr. Romney follows Republican orthodoxy, albeit with his own sunny tone, when it comes to foreign policy. Early in his standard stump speech is a warning about the unique threat of Islamist jihadism.

Repeating the theme of one of his television commercials, he says, "Their goal is to unite the world under a single jihadist caliphate. To do that, they must collapse freedom-loving nations like us."

That's a warning almost identical, in substance, to ones offered by figures such as Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Santorum, who was defeated for a third Senate term last year. But when they deliver it, it echoes with the hoofbeats of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. From the businesslike, ever optimistic Romney, it's just one more item to be checked off from the inbox of can-do Americans.

Mr. Romney similarly wraps an iron message in a velvet tongue as he assails his frequent foil: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. With her in the White House, he says with a smile, it would be "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx."