St. Louis ? The freezing weather, the hoarse candidates making their pitches over and over, the voters trying to make up their minds: Missouri felt a lot like Iowa or New Hampshire this week.

Few states are better situated to test the candidates.

Missouri — with two major cities and a sizable rural population that stretches from plains near Iowa south to the Ozark mountains on the Arkansas border — presents candidates with a microcosm of America. In virtually every key political demographic, from urban-rural split to race to age to union households to education level, Missouri mirrors the country better than almost any other state. Every domestic issue, from crumbling urban infrastructure to the plight of the family farm, has a constituency in Missouri.

So long as favorite son and St. Louis congressman Dick Gephardt was in the Democratic presidential race, swing state Missouri was an afterthought among the seven states holding primaries or caucuses Tuesday. That changed when Gephardt quit after finishing fourth in the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses.

Now Missouri and its 74 delegates — the most of any Tuesday state — are up for grabs, and the contenders are working feverishly to woo voters in a state they didn’t prepare well for.

On Wednesday in St. Louis, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry appeared at a local college, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards at a popular pub and the Rev. Al Sharpton at some stops downtown. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and retired Gen. Wesley Clark also plan stops in Missouri before Tuesday.

How candidates do here may suggest how they’ll fare nationally.

“Missouri should be the state, if you’re doing it logically, that has the first primary, because of its demographics that matter politically,” said Ken Warren, a political scientist at St. Louis University. “Missouri is unique because it is just not like other states that are so nonrepresentative as a whole,” such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

Democratic presidential candidates are turning their attention to Missouri, where 74 delegates will be up for grabs in Tuesday's primary. On Friday, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean spoke in an overflow room during a town hall meeting at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis.

Missouri has voted for the winner in every presidential election but one since 1900. (In 1956, Missourians voted for Adlai Stevenson, but Dwight Eisenhower won.) And the elections are virtually always close: In 2000, Bush beat Gore 50 percent to 47 percent.

Missouri, population 5.7 million, has two urban areas — St. Louis on the state’s eastern border and Kansas City on the west. Some Democrats remain in rural Missouri, but “Little Dixie” — as a large swath of it once was called for its Democratic dominance and conservative leanings — has gone the way of Greater Dixie: It’s now predominantly Republican.

President Bush won nearly 60 percent of Missouri’s rural vote in 2000. Forty years ago, Democrats held all but one of Missouri’s rural congressional districts. Today, only Rep. Ike Skelton remains, and his district is expected to go Republican when Skelton, 73, retires.

So most of the Democratic primary fight will be in and around St. Louis and Kansas City, where Gore took about 54 percent of the vote in 2000 and where more than half of the state’s 3.6 million registered voters live.

So although the Southern centrist Edwards would seem to be a good fit with much of the state, Kerry, hot off his victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, was first up with television ads in St. Louis and Kansas City. A recent poll of likely Missouri voters put Kerry at 25 percent, with Edwards at 9 percent and the others trailing.