South Carolina should be the one state which can save George Bush from political extinction at the hands of John McCain. It is quintessential Republican territory, with a strong religious conservative tradition. The Rev Pat Robertson, head of the powerful Christian Coalition, has endorsed Bush.
A native son, Strom Thurmond, in his 90s, is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and backs Bush. So does the party leadership in a state that for 20 years always picked the candidate who eventually won the Republican nomination. The state also has one of the highest percentages of military veterans living there.
After he was trounced in New Hampshire, Bush saw South Carolina as the sure "firewall" which would stop the McCain challenge, just as the voters there helped his father and later Bob Dole get their campaigns back on track after setbacks in the first primary.
Bush jnr seems to have the Republican core vote sewn up for today's primary. A poll earlier this week showed him with 59 per cent of Republican support, compared with 29 per cent for McCain.
In New Hampshire, the big shock for Bush was not only to lose the independent vote to McCain, which he expected, but also the registered Republicans.
He is determined not to make that mistake in South Carolina and soft-pedalled the "compassionate conservative" label he had been projecting to move sharply to the right. His first rally was in the Bob Jones University, a bastion of religious fundamentalism, where blacks used to be banned and where inter-racial dating is still forbidden on campus.
The Rev Ian Paisley received his doctorate in theology from the university and its website describes Catholicism as a "cult".
The rebel Confederate flag flies over the Capitol in Columbia, the only state house in the US to fly the banner, which is offensive to many blacks who see it as a reminder of slavery. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People has called for years for the flag to be taken down.
Asked for his views on the flying of the flag, Bush dodged the question, saying it was for South Carolina to decide. A Republican governor who proposed a compromise was beaten in the next election. George Bush is taking no chances.
He can't afford to lose here today. McCain would then go on to win his home state of Arizona on Tuesday and probably have the momentum to win the Michigan primary on the same day.
Bill McInturff, a pollster for McCain, says that the 400,000 who are expected to vote today "have more power to determine the next Republican nominee and possibly the next president than anyone else in America, whether they know it or not".
McCain's not so secret weapon is that Democrats and independents can vote in the Republican primary. And many of them will vote for him. A poll earlier this week showed him with the support of 62 per cent of independents and 51 per cent of Democrats.
This has led the McCain camp to invoke memories of the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s, who crossed traditional party lines to put the former Hollywood actor in the White House for eight years.
Bush has expressed concern that South Carolina Democrats will turn out to vote for McCain just to defeat him, and then they will be free to vote Democrat in the presidential election next November.
It is a weird system where Democrats can vote in a contest to select the Republican candidate and it is Bush's bad luck that South Carolina is one of the states which allow it.
But McCain seems to have a genuine appeal for Democrats and independents, with his message of getting rid of the "special interests" in a corrupt Washington, and reforming a campaign finance system which was shamelessly used by the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1996 when $50,000 would allow you to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom in the White House.
With so much at stake, the campaign in South Carolina has seen some muck flying. A Prof Richard Hand at the Bob Jones University sent out a long e-mail stating that McCain "chose to sire children without marriage". When the professor was told by CNN that McCain had no illegitimate children, he replied: "That's a universal negative. Can you prove it?"
The McCain campaign complains that the "Bushies" are using anonymous phone calls to blacken their candidate. Bush said he would fire anyone caught doing this.
McCain's image of integrity took a hit when he backtracked over the Confederate flag issue. First he said it was "offensive" to blacks and a "symbol of racism and slavery", but then corrected himself to say it was all right to fly it because it symbolised Southern honour and valour in the Civil War. His own ancestors fought on the Southern side but had not owned slaves, he added.
An Online magazine, Salon, did some research and found that a great-great grandfather of McCain had 57 slaves on his plantation in Mississippi. McCain shrugged it off when told.
The third Republican candidate running, Alan Keyes, is a descendant of African slaves. It is something of a shock to see an African-American running for the Republican nomination, but then you remember that it still proudly boasts of being "the party of Lincoln" who freed the slaves.
Mr Keyes, who is also a Catholic and running with meagre resources on a strong antiabortion message, has no hope of winning. But a poll shows that most viewers believe he won the much-hyped TV debate between the three candidates last Tuesday night.
However, there were few black faces at the big political rallies here this week. Blacks, who make up about 30 per cent of the population, have little influence and had to go to court to get polling stations set up in the poorer and rural areas of the state for today's vote.
But then it was South Carolina which was the first slave state in the Union to secede and where the first shots in the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, Charleston, where this is being written.
The Irish are not the only people to be obsessed by their history.