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In all but one election in the past 80 years, the presidential candidate who won Tennessee has taken the Oval Office.

But that doesn’t mean Tennessee or its neighbor Georgia are representative of how the rest of the nation will vote, political scientists said. The fact that Tennessee has voted for the candidate who would become president in the last few elections is more coincidental than an indicator of how the rest of the country will vote, they contend.

Polls show U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., up by an average of nearly 15 points in Tennessee over U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., according to Pollster.com.

In Georgia, the gulf is even wider — nearly 16 points — despite the fact that Sen. Obama got nearly two-thirds of the vote in that state’s presidential primary and Georgia’s large black vote. Georgia’s population is almost 30 percent black, Dr. Bullock pointed out, compared to Tennessee, which has a black population of about 17 percent.

“Both of these states are pretty solidly in the McCain camp,” said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia.

Like most of the South, both states are to the right of the rest of the country politically, He said.

But nationally, the race is a dead heat, according to polls.

When did Tennessee voters miss the mark in a presidential race? Volunteer State voters went for Richard Nixon in the 1960 election, which John F. Kennedy won.

During this year’s primary season, University of Tennessee political science professor Michael Fitzgerald said Tennessee’s moderately conservative electorate could serve as a good barometer of how the rest of the country would vote. He said Tennessee was a “must-win” state for Democrats and Republicans.

Tennessee went for U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., by a margin of about 80,000 votes in the primary.

Bruce Oppenheimer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, said Tennessee won’t necessarily go the way the country goes in the general election because it’s a fairly entrenched Red State.

“Tennessee probably has a five- to eight-point Republican lean,” he said. “I don’t see it as a bellwether state.”

Neither do the candidates, according to an analysis of campaign advertising by the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, which studies election-year television advertising. According to its analysis, Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain’s campaigns have run post-convention ads in only 17 states, and Tennessee and Georgia aren’t on the list.

But that doesn’t mean the two campaigns have abandoned the states completely. Chattanooga is home to recently opened headquarters for both the Obama and McCain campaigns, and both candidates have continuing grass-roots efforts in both states.

For Democrats, that effort may not be as much for their lagging presidential candidate as it is for future races, Dr. Bullock said. He said they might be planting seeds for entrenched grass-roots support in future races, such as each state’s 2010 gubernatorial race.

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