FOR a man whose campaign has been belching smoke for several months, George Allen picked a suitable setting for an appearance in the final days of this fiercely fought election.

The Republican Senator for Virginia was at the Philip Morris manufacturing centre in Richmond, a factory that proudly produces 470 million cigarettes a day using local tobacco grown in the state ever since the days of the plantations.

“The people of Virginia know me and I know them,” said the cowboy-booted Senator. He then bridled at insinuations that turning up at a place that has caused death and disease may not be the cleverest message. “These are working people, sir,” he replied. “Men and women putting food on the table for their families.”

One hundred miles north in the liberal suburb of Arlington, Jim Webb, his Democratic opponent, was preparing for a rally with star guest Michael J. Fox, the Hollywood actor afflicted by Parkinson’s disease who has been making emotional appeals for stem cell research funding.

The contrast encapsulates how Virginia, a state that may determine which party controls the US Senate after Tuesday’s elections, has come to straddle America’s increasingly sharp north-south political divide.

But the battle between Mr Allen and Mr Webb defies any such neat caricature.

Mr Webb is by no means a typical Democrat. Although he opposed the Iraq war, he is a decorated Vietnam veteran who served as Ronald Reagan’s navy secretary and has championed what he calls southern “red-neck culture”.

He likes guns so much that he gave his son (who is named after the confederate general Robert E. Lee) a weapon at the age of eight.

When his campaign began earlier this year, it was seen by Democrats as having little more than nuisance value against the incumbent senator — who had already set his sights beyond these elections towards a probable White House bid in 2008. Mr Webb was there to embarrass the Senator rather than beat him.

But that was before Mr Allen opened up the floodgates to a string of allegations about his racial insensitivity when he was filmed taunting a dark-skinned Webb volunteer as “macaca”.

The Senator’s unexpected vulnerability has forced the Democrats into a hasty upgrade of their Virginia campaign. They need to win six seats to regain control of the US Senate and Virginia is now one of them.

The bulk of the Democratic vote is not in rural southern Virginia but in the rapidly expanding northern suburbs of Washington, which probably have more in common with the East Coast’s liberal bastions than with either Mr Allen or Mr Webb.

It has led to the curious sight of the conservative Mr Allen trying to paint Mr Webb as a sexist who, in the words of one Republican attack advert, “is right for ’06 . . . 1806”.

The Allen campaign has seized upon Mr Webb’s war novels, which include passages showing a stripper performing a sex act with a banana, as evidence of the antediluvian attitudes that led him to write an article in 1979 entitled “women can’t fight”.

Mr Webb insists that he has changed since then — much like the demographics of Virginia, which, he told The Times, “seem to be moving in our direction”. But then he paused and remembered who he was, before adding: “We like the old Virginia too.”

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