WASHINGTON — The star of the 2004 presidential campaign may not be a Vermont peacenik or a four-star general. It could turn out to be a small-town, blue-collar guy who loves family, God, country and very fast cars.

Meet the NASCAR Dad, the successor to the Soccer Mom, the well-off suburban woman whom politicians chased in 2000. Political strategists think he’s holding the key to victory next year, although many people who know both politics and NASCAR find the concept a bit daft.

The term NASCAR Dad was coined last year by Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, and it describes rural and small-town voters, especially white men in the South, who once were solid Democrats but who’ve been voting Republican in presidential elections as the parties split over social issues such as race, gays and guns.

In 2000, President Bush swept the South, thanks largely to his astonishing margin among white men there: 70 percent voted for him, according to exit polls. Conventional wisdom says Democrats must win at least one or two Southern states to get elected, therefore must find ways to peel at least some of these voters away from Bush.

Several Democratic presidential candidates have bought the idea.

Florida Sen. Bob Graham hired David “Mudcat” Saunders, a Roanoke, Va., political consultant who’s declared that most white Southern men regard Democrats as “wusses,” to advise him on reaching these voters. The Graham campaign now sponsors a NASCAR racing truck, a Ford F-150 that won its debut race in July at Kansas Speedway.

North Carolina Sen. John Edwards bases his campaign on his small-town Southern roots and aw-shucks manner. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is the polar opposite of aw-shucks, but plays up his mostly pro-gun record. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark’s military record is expected to play well among Southern cultural conservatives.

The model for candidates seeking NASCAR Dads is Mark Warner, a Democrat who was narrowly elected Virginia’s governor in 2001. Warner, with Saunders as an adviser, sponsored a NASCAR truck, was mildly pro-gun and had a bluegrass campaign song. He won 51 percent of Virginia’s rural vote; 10 points better than Al Gore had done in the previous year’s presidential campaign among those voters.

But Warner’s success may not be easily replicated: He followed two Republican administrations, the last of which was widely viewed as a failure; he outspent his Republican opponent nearly 2 to 1 by using a big chunk of his own fortune; and he seeded his campaign with extensive philanthropy in rural Virginia years before the race.

“It wasn’t an all-out effort to attract so-called NASCAR Dads,” said John McGlennon, an expert in Southern politics at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. “He got a lot of local business support because they saw him as someone who would focus state energy on bringing jobs to the region.”

Many describe the very concept of the NASCAR Dad as simplistic.

The idea of NASCAR’s 75 million fans as a seething lot of rural, blue-collar workers spouting “dadgummits” and sporting squirrel rifles is far from reality. Stock car racing may have begun with bootleggers hauling moonshine down back roads, but these days, NASCAR is a corporate giant and many of its fans are well-scrubbed suburbanites who live as far north as Maine.

That NASCAR will switch the sponsorship of its most prestigious racing series next year from Winston cigarettes to Nextel, a wireless communications service, says volumes about the sport’s future, said Mark Howell, a professor at Northwestern Michigan College who wrote “From Moonshine to Madison Avenue: A cultural history of the NASCAR Winston Cup series.”

“As soon as they say ‘blue-collar and rural,’ that tells me they’re functioning on stereotypes of NASCAR fans,” Howell said.

Much of NASCAR’s growth is outside its Southeast base, with popular new tracks in New Hampshire, Kansas City, Kan., Las Vegas, suburban Chicago and Los Angeles. NASCAR’s No. 2 television ratings market is New York City. The average NASCAR fan is more affluent, better educated and more likely to have children younger than 18 than the average American, said Roger vanDerSnick, a NASCAR managing director.

And about 70 percent of them are Republicans, vanDerSnick added.

“From a marketing standpoint, it makes sense to identify consumer target groups who could be influenced by a message,” vanDerSnick said of Democrats’ efforts to woo NASCAR Dads. “They need to be careful not to misunderstand a group and play to stereotypes.”

Nevertheless, many of NASCAR’s most loyal fans remain small-town and blue-collar. Whether they’re swing voters is a subject of some debate.

“It’s probably too soon to tell whether it’s really a swing group whose allegiance is up for grabs,” said Marvin Overby, a political scientist at the University of Missouri.

After all, Overby and others said, those voters tend to be socially conservative, often religious. They savor the nationalistic fervor that permeates each NASCAR event, including military flyovers.

“It’s hard for me to see the numbers for great swaths of voters” going to the Democrats in the South, said Ferrel Guillory, the director of the Program on Southern Politics, Media and Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If the economy remains sour, Democrats could have some hope among NASCAR Dads in small towns. Many textile and manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the region during the past three years, feeding economic anxiety. A recent factory closing in Kannapolis, N.C. — the hometown of the late NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt and just a few miles from the famed Charlotte speedway cost 4,000 jobs.

“They don’t have the luxury of worrying about cultural issues when they’re worrying about their paychecks,” McGlennon said.

Even so, adopting some symbols of the small-town South — sponsoring NASCAR trucks, appearing at races and cultivating subtle stands on issues such as guns — could help some Democratic candidates blunt the “wuss” factor.

“You don’t concede any ground,” Guillory said. “For Edwards, Graham and Clark, it at least cuts your losses. If you knock Bush’s 70 percent down to 60 percent, it would certainly make a difference in a couple of states.”