Mauldin, S.C. ? It isn’t every day that the governor turns up in the cafeteria of Mauldin High School, so the other morning a group of students lined up to talk. Gov. Jim Hodges asked about their studies, their college plans, their families and about why one of them wasn’t in church Sunday morning. He didn’t quite buy her explanation.

In truth, it isn’t every day that a Democratic officeholder turns up anywhere in South Carolina, which makes Hodges not so much a politician as a phenomenon. A generation ago, every governor of South Carolina was a Democrat. Indeed, just about every state officeholder was. But that’s no longer the case. This may be the strongest Republican power center in the nation.

That’s why the mere fact that Hodges won his office in the first place four years ago was remarkable. He was the first Democrat elected to an executive position in the state in a dozen years; when he defeated Republican David Beasley four years ago, he became the first man of any party to defeat an incumbent governor.

“This is a virulently Republican state, and if we didn’t have African-Americans here, this would be Idaho,” says Kevin Geddings, a political consultant with close ties to Hodges. “And it’s a very conservative place. It took until the last couple of years to get the Confederate battle flag off the Capitol and the Martin Luther King holiday on the calendar.”

Hodges is in a tight race against Mark Sanford, a former House member, and against history. Republicans have taken the state in nine of the last 10 presidential elections. In 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson took 44 states in his landslide victory, South Carolina went for Barry Goldwater, the GOP nominee, with 60 percent of the vote. Hodges and Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, who was elected governor in 1958 and has been in the Senate since 1967, are the lone remaining statewide Democratic officers. In his last two contests, Hollings won with only 50 percent and 53 percent of the vote.

“It’s hard for a Democrat to win but it’s possible,” Hodges says in an interview. “You have to talk about bread-and-butter issues education, health care the kind of things people talk about around the dinner table. Democrats in the South have forgotten how to do that.”

Especially here. No state in the nation has undergone such a dramatic political transformation in so short a time as South Carolina. This was, in the memory of some voters, dependably Democratic territory. In the five presidential elections between the Great Depression and Harry S Truman’s 1948 upset, Republicans never took more than 4.5 percent of the vote and twice, in 1932 and 1936, the GOP presidential vote in South Carolina was under 2 percent.

Now the Republican establishment a phrase that is almost redundant here believes that Hodges didn’t win last time so much as his GOP rival, Beasley, lost. They call Hodges the accidental governor the term turns up frequently and have attacked him hard after a divisive primary of their own.

The Republicans control both houses of the state legislature and are determined to win back the governor’s office in a year in which they are certain to win the Senate seat being relinquished by Strom Thurmond, whose switch to the Republican Party in 1964 put the political transformation of the state in motion. Rep. Lindsey Graham, one of the few House impeachment managers to thrive in the years after Bill Clinton’s presidency, is almost certain to defeat Democrat Alex Sanders, the folksy former president of the College of Charleston, and take Thurmond’s place.

“When we have a Republican governor we have a chief fund-raiser, a chief spokesman, officer, a chief booster and a chief cheerleader,” said Ed Matricardi, executive director of the state Republican Party. “When we don’t have that governor, we’re fighting the curve the whole time.”

Hodges is appealing to a largely GOP audience by emphasizing education investments and improvements while Sanford advocates school vouchers. Education, Geddings argues, is the “message that resonates with the Bubbas out there.” Hodges won a battle two years ago to implement a state lottery that’s provided nearly $100 million in college scholarships, and he’s instituted a First Steps program to improve early childhood education.

Now he’s facing the same sort of economic distress that so many governors, Republicans and Democrats alike, are grappling with across the country. This month the state Board of Economic Advisers issued a dire revenue projection, suggesting that state income could be as much as $200 million below a revised estimate and urging the governor to cut government spending. In campaigning around the state, the two candidates have been arguing about how to cut the budget, whether to raise taxes, and how to make the state, which this year lost a new DaimlerChrysler plant to Georgia, more competitive.

But for Democrats, this is also a race about how to make South Carolina more competitive politically and here, as elsewhere, one of the key elements is the black vote. “If we do all the things to make sure black voters come out that conservatives do for the religious right,” says Dick Harpootlian, the state Democratic chairman, “we can win this thing.”

That’s no small challenge, but the survival of two-party politics in a state that once was as dominated by the Democrats as it is today by the Republicans depends on it.

David Shribman is a columnist for The Boston Globe.