WARREN, Mich. -- Republicans Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain are squaring off for what could become the first casket match of the 2008 season: a Michigan Primary that observers say Mr. Romney must win to avoid the same political graveyard that swallowed his father's hopes four decades ago.

Mr. Romney, who was once the putative front-runner in the state, was born in Michigan and began his campaign with an announcement at the Henry Ford Museum of American Industry in nearby Dearborn.

Since then, his campaign has struggled as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Mr. McCain delivered a one-two punch in Iowa and New Hampshire. Last week, struggling for a win, Mr. Romney dropped all pretense. He cancelled his television advertising in Florida and South Carolina and embarked on a frenetic campaign around Michigan.

At one point, he stopped off in Lansing to view a statehouse portrait of his late father, former three-term Gov. George Romney, who saw his own presidential hopes dissolve in 1968.

"He has to win somewhere soon and if he can't win Michigan, where can he win?" said Emmett H. Buell Jr., a conservative academic from Denison University in Ohio and an expert in the primary election system.

Bill Ballenger, editor of a Michigan political newsletter put it this way: "If Romney doesn't win Michigan, you can make an argument that he's toast." This is not to say that Mr. Romney would drop from the race outright. A multimillionaire, he has an estimated $10 million on hand after having raised more than $62 million in the past year -- $17 million of it his own money.

But a Michigan loss, they say, could render him little more than a wealthy ghost as the race shifts to Super Tuesday, Feb, 5, where eyes will turn to see whether former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has any potential after sitting out the early contests to focus on Florida on Jan. 29.

"It has to be about self-respect at some point," said Brian Rogers, Mr. McCain's press secretary.

On a visit to the state's west, Mr. Romney declined to speculate on his future -- at points alternating between defiance and uncertainty.

"I want to win here in Michigan. I anticipate I'm going to win here in Michigan, but I'm not going to tell you what happens if that doesn't happen," Mr. Romney said. "I don't want to forecast from anything other than success. But I intend to keep going through this process. This is not something that will be decided by three or four states."

No one in the Romney camp would declare outright that his campaign is in trouble, as their man repeated his mantra about winning "two silvers and one gold," citing second place showings in Iowa and New Hampshire and a win in the obscure Wyoming contest.

Nor are they pretending that things have turned out as planned.

"The strategy was to win in Iowa and New Hampshire and thereby establish Mitt Romney as the front-runner. Not having succeeded in that, there is no front-runner," said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior Romney adviser.

Yet another sign of troubles for Mr. Romney came in the midst of a mid-morning Huckabee rally in Grand Rapids yesterday where one of Mr. Romney's early Michigan supporters, state Rep. Fulton Sheen, was introduced as the latest member of the state House to endorse Mr. Huckabee.

Mr. Sheen told the surprised crowd that he had changed for two reasons: that Mr. Romney has not enthusiastically supported the "Fair Tax" the way Mr. Huckabee has, and, secondly, that Mr. Huckabee wasn't yet in the presidential race when his first endorsement was made.

Mr. Romney is banking on longstanding -- if antique -- political and social connections to avoid the political toaster. George Romney, his father, was viewed as the political comer of the 1968 primary season, building a base across the country with Republican moderates before falling by the political wayside in a year that resurrected Richard Nixon.

This time it is Mr. McCain, the Arizona senator who won Michigan's 2000 presidential primary over George W. Bush, who is appealing to moderates as well as mainstream conservatives. Mr. Romney, viewed as a moderate Republican during his tenure in Massachusetts, is reaching out to conservative values voters.

Mr. Huckabee remains, as he was in Iowa, a wild card: an engaging public speaker who reaches across the spectrum. In a state with many Christian evangelicals, Mr. Huckabee can remind voters he is a minister. In a state known as a cradle of rock and soul, Mr. Huckabee, himself a rock bassist, ended a speech by recounting the time he gave a gubernatorial pardon to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.

The importance Mr. Romney places in a Michigan win became apparent the day after New Hampshire, when the state's political schedules began filling with Romney events. Mr. McCain, by comparison, flew in for two airport rallies before jetting off to South Carolina, where Republicans vote on Saturday.

"We're after every group. Catholics are important to us. But just the general voter. We're going after everybody," said Chuck Yob, Michigan's Republican National Committeeman and a prominent McCain supporter.

"I think McCain does well with independents, too," Mr. Yob said.

Those independents could matter greatly. Under Michigan's primary rules, independent voters are permitted to cast ballots in either the Democratic or Republican races and, with all major candidates save Mrs. Clinton off the ballot, independents could be drawn to the Republican contest.

Because the Democratic National Committee has essentially voided Michigan's Democratic Primary, vowing not to seat any delegation chosen in Tuesday's vote, the Democratic candidates have avoided campaigning here. Of the first-tier candidates, only Hillary Clinton remained on the ballot.

The temptation could arise for Democrats to cross over and choose from the full slate of candidates on the Republican ticket.

If that were to happen, it could redound to Mr. McCain's favor. In 2000, when Democrats had no primary and Republicans did, state party officials estimated that as much as 20 percent of that vote was Democrats crossing over. That was the year, noted party chairman Saul Anuzis, that Mr. McCain carried the state over Mr. Bush, largely on the strength of that crossover vote.

On a swing through the eastern half of the state yesterday, Mr. McCain declined to speculate on whether that pattern could repeat.

"I don't have a way of knowing," Mr. McCain said. "We obviously need the Republican base. We would like to have any other voter who supports me for president. But I don't know what the turnout's going to be or who's going to turn out."

To carry Michigan, candidates will need to convince primary-goers that they can do something to reverse an economic and population decline that Mr. Romney himself described as a "one-state recession." Unemployment here is 7.4 percent, the highest in the nation. Along with Rhode Island, Michigan shares the unhappy distinction of being one of two states to suffer a net loss of population in recent years. Once a source of wealth beyond calculation, Michigan's automobile industry has declined.

"Only two states have actually lost jobs -- Michigan and Louisiana after Katrina. We didn't even have a hurricane," said Faith Steketee, executive director of the Ottawa County Republican Committee.

Last week's business news here was dominated by worried speculation that Japan's Toyota, having displaced Ford as the No. 2 automobile manufacturer, is poised to displace No. 1 General Motors as well.

"My congregation has lost members," said the Rev. Tim McCoy, pastor at Liberty Baptist Church in the Detroit suburb of Belleville.

In language uncharacteristic of the free-market rhetoric in most Republican circles -- but widely heard at GOP gatherings in the state's east -- Mr. McCoy called for government to do something.

"We've lost, I think, 30,000 people in the last year. Every time you turn around we're being taxed to death. We've got no more to give. It's time that they gave back to us," Mr. McCoy said.

At present, he's leaning toward Mr. Huckabee.

"I think Mitt Romney means well. I really don't know what to think of him as yet," Mr. McCoy said.

Mr. McCoy spoke outside Detroit's Masonic Hall, an ornate, stone tower in the city's downtown, a spot surrounded by vacant lots, dilapidated houses and the husks of gutted commercial buildings.

It was here that Mr. Huckabee came to make his case to the Detroit Economic Club, and he did so in language that sometimes sounded like a blend of Dwight Eisenhower and John Edwards.

"I think it is fair to say that there was a time when Michigan helped save America and it may be time for America to help save Michigan," Mr. Huckabee said to a roar of approval.

While later saying that the federal government might be able to help Michigan through programs such as training, Mr. Huckabee stopped short of advocating government intervention. In comments to the press after his speech, Mr. Huckabee expounded on his theory of how to save the state.

"A lot of it is changing our tax system, changing our regulatory system, making it so that people in this state can manufacture and build again competitively. That's making sure that our trading partners are playing by the same rules that our Michigan manufacturers have to play by," Mr. Huckabee said.

His signature economic proposal has turned on a breathtaking revamp of the tax system: eliminating income, capital gains and inheritance taxes, and shifting to the so-called "Fair Tax" -- basically a national sales tax. Mr. Huckabee says it would take regulatory and tax burdens off employers and provide an incentive for workers to be more productive.

Mr. Romney's speech to the Economic Club comes tomorrow. But to voters at large, he has pressed his case as a man who understands Michigan's manufacturing economy.

So far, the hottest debate has centered on whether old manufacturing jobs lost can be restored. Mr. Romney says they can. Mr. McCain says they won't.

"I want to again assure the people of Michigan that I would be ashamed and embarrassed to say that some of those jobs are coming back," Mr. McCain said after a town hall meeting yesterday. "I'm confident in the future of the state of Michigan by the creation of new jobs."

Like the others, he wasn't specific, beyond saying that the government can construct programs to retrain displaced workers, primarily through the use of community colleges. But, absent an endorsement for the "Fair Tax," which he called intriguing but unlikely, Mr. McCain's key message mirrored Mr. Huckabee's.

"Michigan once saved the world in World War II. It can do it again," Mr. McCain said. "I'm going to come back here to Michigan and sit down here and work and work with the local people and the legislture and the governor and the congressmen and we're going to bring Michigan back."

On the other side of the state, Mr. Romney delivered up a counterpoint reminiscent of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis' declaration to a crowd of Pittsburgh voters 20 years ago: "Don't let anyone tell you steel is dead."

Mr. Romney spoke of growing up in the automobile industry and imagining he would one day be CEO of a major car company. He said that the industry here can yet be redeemed.

He took special aim at the CAFE (federal corporate average fuel-efficiency) standards.

"It has to be a process which works for the domestic manufacturers. That was not the case in the last CAFE and it should not be the case in the next CAFE," Mr. Romney said.

As in Pennsylvania, Michigan's struggling industrial base coexists with a vibrant agricultural industry. In the state's west, where farms spread out around the still-thriving furniture plants near Grand Rapids, a strong contingent of conservative evangelicals provide the core of Michigan's "values" voters.

These are largely descendants of the Dutch Reformed Protestant tradition -- staunch Calvinists who long ago began voting Republican as an extension of their faith.

These voters could represent the best chance of reinvigorating the Romney campaign.

To win in the west, Mr. Romney will have to fend off any poaching by the campaign's most prominent evangelical, Mr. Huckabee. Among Iowa's evangelicals Mr. Huckabee broke through with a surprising first-place finish.

"Huckabee will do well in Michigan," predicted Chuck Yob, a Republican national committeeman from Michigan and a key McCain supporter.

The votes up for grabs in the west belong to men like Marc Smeyers, a 29-year-old automotive engineer from the city of Holland, and a member of the Reformed Church. Like so many other conservatives in this state, Mr. Smeyers now wonders if a little more involvement by government might actually help the economy.

"Michigan needs to have a revitalization occur," Mr. Smeyers said. "I don't know that there's one point specifically that's going to fix and turn things around. But government needs to work with these corporations to see what they need to keep these jobs in the U.S."

As of the weekend, Mr. Smeyers was hovering between a Romney and a Huckabee vote. One possible tripwire: Mr. Romney's Mormon faith, something with which Mr. Smeyers is unfamiliar.

"It's a concern to me," he said.

But if the McCain campaign is hoping that Mr. Romney's Mormon faith proves a disincentive to these evangelicals that theory has yet to be borne out, says Mrs. Steketee, the Ottawa GOP director.

"Most people base their choices on their religious beliefs, but not on their specific religion," Mrs. Steketee said. "So Mitt Romney would not be hurt by being a Mormon."

Nonetheless, notes Mr. Ballenger, the newsletter editor, a second or third place finish in Michigan would likely not bump Mr. McCain, nor Mr. Huckabee, as the men go into the South and Super Tuesday. For Mr. Romney, born and raised here, it would be a rejection.

And a rejection in Michigan, said Mr. Ballenger, could provide this outcome: "The race could boil down to McCain versus Huckabee the rest of the way."