WAYNE, Pa. -- Here in Philadelphia's politically crucial suburban "collar counties," a fierce battle is taking place for votes in the April 22 Democratic presidential primary. Right now it looks like a draw.

On a recent weekday afternoon at Anthropologie, the ultra-chic faux bohemian furniture and apparel chain -- whose first store opened in 1992 in this wealthy Main Line suburb -- several customers examining the $5,000 distressed leather sofas and the $16 Depression glass goblets said they were leaning toward Sen. Barack Obama.

At the same time, the women who were selling them these items voiced admiration for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"I'm 80 percent for Obama," said Connie Noble, of Gladwyne, who said she'd watched -- with some dismay -- excerpts of the 2004 Senate Iraq debate on "Bill Moyers' Journal" the night before.

"Obama has character. He doesn't go with the crowd. Hillary, on the other hand, completely caved in on Iraq," she added angrily, pointing her finger in the air for emphasis.

A few steps away, Megan Semerod, a saleswoman, smiled shyly behind a clothing rack. "I'm for Sen. Clinton. I like that she wants to make sure that everyone has health care. My mom loves her too," added Ms. Semerod, who is working an extra job to put herself through the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine.

There is much about the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware and Chester counties that hold true to stereotype: Yes, they are packed with highly educated, affluent voters -- socially tolerant fiscal conservatives who were dubbed "Wofford Republicans" 17 years ago when they crossed over to support Democrat Harris Wofford in his successful 1991 bid for the U.S. Senate.

Far from being monolithic, however, this region of more than 2.4 million people "is exactly a copy of America, because it has everything here, from the working poor to the middle-class to the rural to the rich," said U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, whose district includes most of Delaware County and parts of Montgomery and Chester counties.

"I think this is where the battleground is, and it should be," said Mr. Sestak, a retired three-star admiral who defeated longtime incumbent Rep. Curt Weldon in 2006. "This is a tough group of constituents who will look, measure and watch the candidates very carefully over the next few weeks."

Surprises are everywhere: there's a stagnant, aging population -- but relatively low unemployment. Delaware County lost 22 percent of its manufacturing establishments over the past six years -- but boasts Boeing Corp. among its corporate tenants.

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There are older, poorer, "inner ring" suburbs like Upper Darby, the largest municipality in the state and urban poverty in Chester -- which is in Delaware County, not nearby Chester County, the richest county in the state, with green spaces, horse farms and old money.

In the middle of prosperous Montgomery County, with its miles and miles of "executive campuses," and corporate parks, there is Norristown, a depressed industrial center that has attracted numerous immigrants, including a large Hispanic population; not far away, the Radnor school district ranks as one of the best-funded in the state.

There are some political surprises, too: At a rally Monday for Mrs. Clinton in suburban Blue Bell, many of the women jamming a gymnasium at Montgomery County Community College were affluent and college-educated -- not the same constituency that dominates her polling data. On the heavily pro-Obama Swarthmore College campus, it was no trouble to find two students who argued passionately for Mrs. Clinton.

Yet, at The Court Diner in downtown Media, Delaware County, Michelle Ratcliffe, a 39-year old waitress from East Lansdowne, has no health insurance and can't afford vaccinations for her 4-year-old daughter.

Perfect Hillary Clinton material, right?

Wrong.

"Obama is good and so is she," Ms. Ratcliffe said. "It's tough, isn't it?"

One more surprise, at least to people living outside Delaware County: Ms. Ratcliffe has been, like most blue-collar people here, a Republican all her life. Now, though, she is changing parties, as is her fellow waitress Patty Snow -- and just about every other customer sitting at the diner's counter on a recent morning.

"We are born into our parties in Pennsylvania," said Ms. Snow, a 44-year old mother of six children, who also has no health insurance. She is still undecided but leaning toward Mrs. Clinton. "I worry about my kids, and what they're facing, and all the money they're spending in Iraq. That's pretty much brought me to the point where I'm switching to Democrat. "

What seems like a relatively new -- and much hyped -- phenomenon actually began in the early 1990s, when more and more Philadelphia residents moved out of the city, and brought their politics with them.

Since 1992, three of the four counties, Chester excepted, have voted for the Democratic candidate for president. Mr. Sestak's recent victory made him only the second Democrat elected to a congressional seat in his district since the Civil War. (The first was Bob Edgar, now president of Common Cause.)

In this latest election cycle, he and other Democrats claim, the steady shift toward their party has became a surge. In Bucks County, for example, the 40,000 Republican voter registration advantage in 1998 will probably shrink to about 8,000 this year, said Neil Samuels, deputy chair of the Bucks County Democratic Committee.

"Just like [Democratic Party Chairman] Howard Dean initiated a 50-state strategy, we initiated a 54-municipality strategy in Bucks in 2004, when, for all intents and purposes, there was no Democratic Party there," said Mr. Samuels, a creative director at an advertising agency. Since then, the Democrats have won races in 40 municipal organizations across the county, he said. Republicans still hold a majority among the county commissioners.

Similar trends are occurring in Montgomery County, added Marcel Groen, that county's Democratic party chairman and a supporter of Mrs. Clinton. It's also happening to a somewhat lesser extent in Delaware County, where the Republican political establishment's roots are deeper.

Even in Chester -- where Republicans still hold a significant voter advantage -- Democrats won this cycle's registration contest, signing up more new party members than the Republicans did, said Michelle Vaughn, chair of that county's Democratic State Committee, who is remaining neutral in the primary.

One of them was Helen Connus, 86, of Willistown, Chester County.

"My daughter and I decided to do it on Friday, but we weren't going to tell her husband, because we thought he might object," said Mrs. Connus, who showed up at the county's Obama headquarters Tuesday afternoon to volunteer her services. "Then, on Saturday, he told us he was going to do it and would we mind?" she added.

'Boatload of trouble right now'

While it's suspected that the influx of new Democrats is good news for Mr. Obama -- since many of Mrs. Clinton's supporters are already longtime party faithful -- it's still not quite clear who will prevail here. So far, Mrs. Clinton has raised $1.55 million in these four counties and Mr. Obama has raised $1.47 million, according to the latest Federal Election Commission reports. Sen. John McCain has raised $597, 842.

A recent Franklin & Marshall University poll put Mrs. Clinton ahead everywhere in the state save Philadelphia. In the suburbs, local party officials are reporting an even split.

"It's running about 50-50 among our committee people," says Bill Scott, a Chester County Democratic Committee member, who supports Mr. Obama, an assertion echoed by Mr. Samuels in Bucks, who is also for Mr. Obama.

It's a somewhat different story in Montgomery County, where there's a strong tradition of politically active women. It's now represented in Congress by Rep. Allyson Schwartz, a longtime state legislator. The 17th state Senate seat, which includes much of the county, is currently occupied by Democrat Connie Williams. Several county row office positions are filled by women.

At the Clinton rally in Blue Bell, the "Emily's List" crowd was out in full force -- highly educated 1960 and 1970s-era feminists, who, like the Washington-based fundraising organization, want to see a politically liberal woman elected president.

"This is important to me. I came of age in the women's movement," said Ms. Williams, who is in her early 60s. Suzanne MacPherson, 54, a corporate administrator for TMG Health, Inc., in King of Prussia, expressed greater nostalgia for the 1990s.

"I can't afford to live the way I did when Bill Clinton was president," she said. "I can't afford to splurge the way I did. I have to watch where I drive. And while I'm a Democrat, there were a lot of Republican women standing in line with me today who say they're voting on the same issues I am."

While those issues would include the war, health care and the economy -- the subprime mortgage crisis is less of a factor since real estate values never soared very high in this area -- there remain real differences among the voters on how to resolve them.

For every fiscally conservative smaller businessman worried about paying for health care for his employees, there are people like Bethany Fuller, 29, who says she wants "something as close to socialized health care as I can," adding that she considered herself politically "very left wing."

Ms. Fuller, who was nursing her 5-month-old baby at the Clinton rally, fits the profile of more and more people moving into Bucks County -- many of them commuters from New York -- although she said she and her husband still haven't made up their minds on whom to support.

"I came to see Sen. Clinton today and I'll be reporting back to him," she said.

Then, there's Stanford University student Suzanne Alvarez, 19. Standing in the upscale King of Prussia mall clad in a tiny sweater -- from Anthropologie -- she looked the very picture of the earnest, affluent college student.

Tailor-made for Mr. Obama, right?

Wrong.

Ms. Alvarez supports Mrs. Clinton because of her experience, and, she added, she doesn't want to see us "toss everything and run out of Iraq. There's got to be a way to get out that's thought through."

Her mother, Eva Alvarez, 56, was even more emphatic. A social worker who downsized from a larger home in Elkins Park to a smaller one in Willow Grove so she and her husband could send their three children to college, she was unimpressed with Mr. Obama's resume.

"We don't have the time to grow with Sen. Obama. We are in a boatload of trouble now and we have lots of work to do. We need to fix the economy and clean up our environmental policies. And, frankly, I don't think he's bitchy enough, or tough enough, and she is."

Still if the infighting drags on much longer between the two claimants to the Democratic nomination, the "Wofford Republicans" in these four counties may well return to their roots the fall general election.

It's one option being pondered by Jim Barber, 70, of Northampton Township, a conservative middle class community in Bucks County, where he moved 40 years ago from a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia,

A retired Defense Department employee, Mr. Barber is a registered Republican who will not vote in next month's primary. While he is not ruling out Sen. John McCain in the fall -- "I admire him tremendously. He's a warrior of bottomless courage" -- he is giving serious consideration to voting Democratic in November,

"We admire people who work hard in this community, who came up in the ranks from the bottom, and I can't think of anything Obama can point to in that regard, while I think Hillary has substantially more claim on the Oval Office than he does."

Mr. McCain, on the other hand, "is a Samurai, and that worries me. That's his whole family history, in fact. They will choose death rather than defeat, and in these times I don't want someone sitting across the table from our enemies who will hit the button in a millisecond. If there's every a time for delicate negotiations, it's now."

He longs, in fact, for the day when Republicans in the mold of the late Sen. Hugh Scott, a moderate who served in the Senate from 1959 to 1977, return to office in Bucks County.

"I keep hoping there will be more of them coming along, and actually, I sense the tide is turning. Government needs to be fiscally responsible and socially responsible, but its first priority is to take care of people who need taking care of.

"And these days, there aren't many of them left in the Pennsylvania GOP."