MANCHESTER, N.H. -- It's already snowing on Mount Washington, but there's something about this state that warms Sen. John McCain's soul.

At a freezing ice hockey rink at Saint Anselm's College on Wednesday, the Republican presidential nominee seemed more elated than embattled, visibly relishing his underdog status.

Standing tieless before a crowd of 1,600, Mr. McCain frankly declared his love for New Hampshire's voters, who rescued him from political oblivion in two presidential primaries -- 2000 and 2008.

As new polling numbers show the race tightening here, clearly Mr. McCain hopes they'll do it again on Nov. 4.

"I can't think of any place I'd rather be as the election draws close -- an underdog campaign in the state New Hampshire," Mr. McCain roared as the crowd roared back "Some of my happiest memories are of this wonderful, wonderful state. I feel I know it."

He should. In the 2000 primary, Mr. McCain thrashed George W. Bush here by 19 points; earlier this year, he bested former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney after the McCain campaign, basically broke, staged scores of town hall meetings up and down the state.

Usually, New Hampshire's star turn comes in snowy January's presidential primary, but this fall election season, as leaf-peepers clog the roadways gaping at the bronze and gold-washed mountains, the state finds itself in the political spotlight for the second time in a year.

Mr. McCain has visited five times since securing the nomination in February. Sen. Barack Obama was here two weeks ago, the day after the final debate -- and ran a Web ad recently touting five New Hampshire residents and former McCain supporters who had switched to him.

It isn't clear if Mr. McCain can win New Hampshire again, but the political math says he must. To get to 270 votes and the presidency, he needs not just the Republican states where Mr. Obama currently leads -- Florida, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia -- but also Pennsylvania or some mix of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and New Hampshire.

"If John McCain can't win a state like New Hampshire, there's no way he can win the election," said Linda Fowler, a professor of government at Dartmouth College in Hanover. "This state is sort of made to order for him, and during the primary, people liked the straight talk, even if they didn't agree with him on the war. It was a real love fest, but that doesn't seem to be happening this time."

"McCain's really been lashing out," said Hilary Cleveland, 80, a history teacher at Colby-Sawyer College and the widow of former U.S. Rep. James Cleveland. A classic Yankee Republican, she's economically conservative and socially moderate -- and unhappy, she says, with the tone of Mr. McCain's general election campaign, citing in particular its robocalls linking Mr. Obama to domestic terrorist William Ayers.

"But I'm not so much anti-McCain as pro-Obama," she said, noting that she's something of an outlier in her resolutely Republican town of New London, N.H.. "Many of my friends don't understand me. They just think I'm a kook," she laughed.

Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama have been vying for the state's sizable, volatile population of independent or "undeclared" voters and are, perhaps, the key to this contest. It's the undeclared who helped the Arizona senator win the 2000 and 2008 primaries.

Given the electorate's three-way split here -- there are 333,000 undeclared voters, 271,000 Republicans and 265,000 Democrats, according to Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire -- Mr. McCain needs a sizable crossover to the GOP column.

Those would include people like Bill Terrill, a long-distance truck driver from Raymond, N.H., who is not sure yet who he's voting for, although he admires Mr. McCain's military background and his honesty.

"He speaks from the heart," said Mr. Terrill, 64, while downing breakfast one recent Sunday at the Red Arrow Diner in Manchester. "Of course, Mr. Obama basically speaks from the heart too, but we'll wait and see. Just a few more encouraging notes from either one of them will swing me one way or the other."

Another independent, Joanna Lemire, voted for Mr. Bush in 2004, but this year for the first time, she's considering a vote for the Democrat -- a "scary" prospect, the 42-year old Weare, N.H., resident said with a laugh.

"People are only now starting to make up their minds -- maybe earlier this year now that the Red Sox aren't in the World Series," added Andrew Smith, a political scientist and director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center's Granite State Polls. He recently co-authored a study that found nearly a third of the state's 991,000 potential voters either weren't old enough to vote in 2000 or hadn't moved here yet.

While history runs deeply through New Hampshire's quaint villages and rusted mill towns, where many families go back generations, fewer than 45 percent of the state's residents were born here -- compared with a national average of 67 percent, making for one of the most mobile populations in the country. Over the past two decades, high-tech workers have migrated into southern New Hampshire, and affluent retirees have moved to the recreational or academic centers near the White Mountains or Hanover.

Indeed, if you're new, chances are you're blue, Mr. Smith's study found: 53 percent of new young voters and 52 percent of new "migrant" voters were more likely to identify with Democrats than with Republicans, compared with 43 percent of established voters.

The new and the blue are scattered mostly in three areas: along the Massachusetts border, on New Hampshire's short, crowded seacoast or clustered around Hanover and the Connecticut River valley. And they've, no doubt, contributed to recent gains made by Democrats -- not only by occupying the governor's office, but, in 2006, bt taking both congressional seats and sweeping the state House.

"The real question is, will these voters, who are furious with the Republicans for being spenders, about Iraq and on social issues -- will these people go back to the Republican Party this year or stay with the Democrats? Right now, it's impossible to know," Mr. Fowler said.

Despite the state's relatively low unemployment rate and economic prosperity, "the fundamentals favor Sen. Obama," Mr. Smith said, with voters, shaken by the fiscal mess on Wall Street, the war in Iraq and general unhappiness with President Bush, citing the economy as their number one concern.

Last week a Concord Monitor poll showed Mr. Obama ahead by seven points, but by Friday, a Rasmussen Reports tracking poll revealed a tightening race, with the Democrat ahead by four. That slight movement toward Mr. McCain may be the direct result of Wednesday's visit, or it may be the first stirrings of a famous quadrennial phenomenon that veteran GOP strategist Tom Rath described as "last-minute voting."

Mr. Rath, who supported Mr. Romney in the primary, recalled that his candidate had a 10- to 12 -point lead the weekend before the election.

"The independents looked at those numbers and said, 'Well, [Romney]'s got it, so I think I'm going to go vote for my friend John McCain. That voting group is the least reliable, most savvy part of the electorate," he said.

This tax-loathing, government-averse state still has its share of staunch Republicans and libertarians, tucked away in the isolated hills and valleys, north of the White Mountains, in the state's lakes region and in its small, livable cities, too.

Last Sunday morning, Mr. McCain's state headquarters -- in the restored Waumbec Mill along Manchester's Merrimack River -- was buzzing with volunteers manning phone banks and walk-ins seeking campaign buttons and bumper stickers .

Mr. Obama "is a little too liberal for me," said Kim Quinn, 42, of Manchester, who cited taxes as her number one issue, "although there are a lot of Obama supporters, especially with the economy right now. My 401(k) isn't as pretty as it was two weeks ago."

Still, unpredictability reigns. Thirty miles outside of Hanover, in Grafton -- home to founding father John Hancock and, more recently, to a clutch of anti-government Free State Party members, who unsuccessfully sought to make the town their party's capital -- a shouting match broke out in the town's general store over whether Mr. Obama was a Muslim or not. And last Sunday afternoon, a woman named Nancy Niemi stood on her front porch and declared to an Obama canvasser, "I would never vote for a pagan."

Mr. Obama is a Christian, the canvasser countered, but Mrs. Niemi was having none of it. "I think anyone who is elected president should have served in the military," she added.

Just down the road, though, Roseanne Kramer stood on her front porch and said that when she watched Mr. Obama speak at the 2004 Democratic convention, she decided -- 30 years after moving to this country from New Zealand -- to become an American citizen.

"I just love that guy," she said. "Just the articulation and everything that he stands for. I think it's the hope, it's everything."

In a state that crawls with pollsters, news media and campaign staffers every four years, where the phone rings at dinner and the doorbell sometimes rings a a half dozen times a day -- there remains a resistance, however, in some quarters to being quizzed and poked and diagnosed..

"That's not for you to know," snapped a salesman at Radio Shack in North Conway, a mostly Republican area in the White Mountains, when asked how he was leaning in the election. "I make it a point not to discuss religion or politics," said the man, identifying himself only as Eric. Then he relented somewhat, saying he was for McCain, "but I don't think either candidate really understands what average people go through."

"My policy is that I give my say every four years at the polls and I'm not getting into arguments into it," added Michael Shanks, 61, of Grafton, another Republican. "I see cars on the road with all these bumper stickers plastered all over it for the Democrats, 'Impeach Bush,' that sort of thing, and then I see a nice car with one simple McCain sticker, and to me that says it all. I vote my feelings on election day."

That core group that makes up its minds late often doesn't get picked up in polling, says former state Democratic Party chair Kathy Sullivan, but even if Mr. Obama only wins two-thirds of those who claim to support him, he'll still eke out a victory, she believes. At a debate last week at New England College between Republican Sen. John Sununu and his opponent, former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, Ms. Sullivan wondered why Mr. McCain kept returning to New Hampshire, given that the campaign has trimmed new advertising buys here to conserve money for other states, like Pennsylvania.

"I think he's having trouble letting go," she said. "The state was so good to him in 2000 and in this year's primary, and even though he's not the John McCain of those campaigns, I think he believes people will remember that and support him. I don't think it will work, though."

Mr. Rath holds out hope that John McCain's unique history here -- a state second in importance, perhaps, only to Arizona in the senator's lengthy, colorful political biography -- will pull him through.

"There's a well-known line in Robert Frost's poem, 'The Death of the Hired Man,' " Mr. Rath recalled, quoting another famous New Hampshire resident, "where the farmer says, 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.'

"Well, when the time comes around again, maybe the voters will feel the same way about John McCain."