Check the calendar.

It's three days to February. Filing begins on March 16 and ends March 30. Primaries are June 13.

Democrats should take note.

Well into the election year, they are far from mounting a serious challenge to Republican dominance.

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Their primary candidates for governor have campaigned in obscurity for most of a year, and with time running short for recruiting, organizing and raising money, Democrats have fielded candidates for only one-third of the nine constitutional offices at stake.

The party has no announced contenders for attorney general, superintendent of education, adjutant general, agriculture commissioner, comptroller general and secretary of state.

Where 16 Republicans, seven of them incumbents, have established campaigns, only four Democrats, one an incumbent, are actively campaigning and raising money.

Declining fortunes

The Democrats' top ballot-box draw, Education Superintendent Inez Tenenbaum, is hanging it up, for now anyway, leaving 82-year-old Treasurer Grady Patterson as the sole incumbent Democrat on the state ballot.

Some Democrats' top choice to carry the education torch, Greenville lawyer Frank Holleman III, a former U.S. Education Department official, citing family reasons, has taken himself out of the running.

Despite that, as of last week, the Greenville County party's Web site showed a picture of a younger Holleman under the headline, "Run, Frank, Run."

So far, state Sen. Tommy Moore of Aiken and Florence Mayor Frank Willis, who are are running for governor, Robert Barber for lieutenant governor and Patterson make up the Democratic field.

A politically unknown Orangeburg farmer, L. Emile Defelice, has filed with the state Ethics Commission, reporting $1,000 raised, but hasn't announced his candidacy.

Reflecting the shift in each party's fortunes over the past two decades, from governor to agriculture commissioner, Republicans hold seven offices, plus 100 of 170 state legislative seats, four of the six U.S. House districts and both U.S. Senate seats.

Primary bonanza

Already, there are Republican primaries for six of the constitutional offices.

By contrast, Democrats so far have one, the two-way primary for governor.

"This is not unusual," Lachlan McIntosh, the Democratic Party's executive director, says of late decisions. "I think we'll have a great slate."

Wait much longer and he'll need a search party.

GOP Chairman Katon Dawson, said that from the standpoint of a party chairman, "it would be, for me, a nightmare to be sitting here on Feb. 1 and only have candidates for three offices. I just don't know how they can get prepared."

Do the math, Dawson said.

"Every day that goes by is a day they cannot raise the proper amount of money."

Meanwhile, Republicans are awash in candidates, from incumbents to primary challengers. And money.

The 16 GOP candidates raised $8.75 million through Dec. 31. The five Democrats reported $2.2 million.

Although primaries can be treasury-draining affairs and sometimes divisive, they also serve to build candidates' name recognition, especially for challengers, while honing policy positions and fine-tuning organizations.

Opposition view

To McIntosh, the slim, late field and lack of primaries isn't troublesome.

"The truth is, the big, contested primaries like the Republicans are having for lieutenant governor get started early, but for these other races that aren't hotly contested primaries, they really don't need to," he said.

McIntosh sees comparisons to 1998, when some down-ballot Democrats entered late and "we won a lot of races that year."

A lot, yes, by current Democratic standards: governor, after incumbent Republican David Beasley shot himself in the foot; treasurer, a comeback for Patterson after being ousted in 1994; comptroller general and education superintendent.

By 2002, only Patterson and Tenenbaum made it to the winner's circle, and this time around, Tenenbaum is retiring, two years after losing a U.S. Senate race for a seat her party had held for a century.

Since 1990, when Carroll Campbell's re-election as governor accelerated the GOP's ascendancy, Democratic candidates have averaged 44 percent of the votes in top-ticket races.

Defining battle

Scott Huffmon, a Winthrop University professor, suggests Democrats have been brought to this stage because Republicans have consistently won the battle of defining the other side, convincing the average voter that state and national Democrats are cut from the same cloth even though there are key differences.

Huffmon said state Democrats, faced with GOP dominance of the conservative agenda over the past two decades, haven't been able "to firmly establish an identity that is readily recognized by the average citizen in a way that makes that citizen believe he or she can be represented by a Democrat."

Democrats stemmed the GOP tide in North Carolina in the early 1990s and, more recently, in Virginia. But their South Carolina counterparts have been in a steady slide, the 1998 successes being more about passing Republicans miscues than a Democratic renaissance.

While South Carolina Democrats on balance may be more conservative, or less liberal, if you will, than the national party, their primary voters may not always reflect that. They weed out more conservative candidates, much as Democrats do nationally in the presidential nominating process.

"The danger comes not from the nominees, per se, but from the message they have to embrace to reach strong, core Democratic voters who -- by definition -- will be more in line with the national party," Huffmon said.

With their declining base, South Carolina Democrats are hard-pressed to produce the bench strength to field an array of competitive candidates, something the more pragmatic party leaders have recognized and acknowledged will take multiple election cycles of political scratching and clawing to overcome.