Voters in state House District 24 haven't had to rely on news stories or TV ads to get a handle on the contenders for the seat, open for the first time in 25 years.

Odds are, those who go to the polls Tuesday to decide between Republican Bruce Bannister and Democrat Michelle Shain will have either shaken the candidates' hands, read a personal note, talked with them on the phone or perused a mailing.

Or all of the above in a throwback to the old days of shoeleather politicking.

Largely dictated by geography and finances, that's how campaigning is done in an off-year, special election in a relatively compact urban-suburban district.

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One evening last week offered a microcosm of how Shain, a Greenville City Council member, and Bannister, a young attorney in his first bid for elective office, approached the mechanics of wooing voters.

On West Tallulah Street, in his native Old Greenville neighborhood, Bannister and a half-dozen supporters fanned out just as a fine rain began falling, threatening worse that never came.

They were armed with stacks of brochures, computer map printouts showing the evening's target streets, and lists of voters covering their election day participation going back eight years.

There would be a lot of preaching to the choir: Few houses in his neighborhood didn't have Bannister yard signs. The candidate admonished his crew not to bother with the few homes with Shain signs.

At No. 31, when no one answered his ring, Bannister wrote on a brochure, "Sorry I missed you, Bruce," and stuck it in the door handle.

Moving on, Jim Maddrey was home, but told Bannister, "I'm still deliberating."

But on this day, few people were home.

Several miles to the east, Shain ducked into friend Tina Hampton's cul de sac home on Margaux Way in the tidy garden home subdivision of Cypress Run, just off Feaster Road, to change into a campaign T-shirt.

It now is past 6 p.m., and several residents tell Shain, "I just saw you on TV," after WYFF aired a segment on the House 24 campaign. "I hope I was good," Shain tells them.

There are no yard signs to use as guides. The neighborhood's covenant forbids them, said Hampton, a Republican who will cast a rare Democratic vote for her friend Shain.

Where no one answers the door at a Clairwood Court residence, Shain writes on a brochure, "Sorry we missed you," and signs her name and Hampton's, an around-the-corner neighbor.

Kim Weeks, a transplanted Atlantan who has lived in Greenville for 16 years, chats briefly, but is noncommittal.

There are frustrations.

At one house, someone raises a window blind, peers out, ignores the doorbell. At another, a retired couple professes to have given up on voting years ago. At two others, the occupants are foreign nationals and a businessman just moved from Utah.

But as the evening wears on and folks returned home in this dual wage-earner society, the contacts gained pace.

One state House election out of 124 normally isn't a big deal.

This one is.

For openers, it's the seat held by David Wilkins for 25 years. When he resigned June 2 to become ambassador to Canada, Republican Wilkins had been House speaker -- some say the second most powerful office in the state -- for a decade.

Given Greenville's and the district's voting patterns, this is Republican territory, but Democrats have seen a chance with Shain to pull the upset, to sort of tweak the elephant's trunk on its home turf.

The differences in party strength played out in the candidate selection process when Bannister emerged as the last man standing after a four-way primary and runoff. Shain was the Democrats' consensus choice.

"She's moderate, sensible and experienced," Greenville Democratic Chairman Andy Arnold said of Shain. And if topping Bannister in the money chase is any predictor, "That gives us room to be optimistic."

Monday, when two U.S. senators and Greenville's elected Republican officialdom turned out, to no one's surprise, to endorse Bannister, Democrats took that as a good sign. After all, Wilkins never had to trot out boosters. He just filed and won again.

"It looks like Michelle has them scrambling," said Lachlan McIntosh, executive director of a state Democratic Party that is intently watching the race.

Voting patterns suggest an uphill fight for Shain. The Greenville-Mauldin-Woodruff Road district consistently gives two-thirds of its votes to Republicans.

In their public exchanges, taxes and school vouchers have sharply divided the pair.

Bannister signed the Americans for Tax Reform pledge to oppose tax increases; Shain rejected it, saying she wants a comprehensive review of the state's tax code and doesn't want to be barred from a swapping one tax cut for another's increase.

Shain signed the Choose Children First pledge to vote against Republican Gov. Mark Sanford's Putting Parents in Charge school choice plan built around tax credits for public and private school parents. Bannister refused.

Where Shain has said her election to the GOP-held House and Republican-dominated Greenville delegation would offer "balance," Bannister has scoffed.

"The district would be better served with a representative who is at the table where decisions will be made. A Democrat won't," he said.

"I'm at the table right now; he's not," Shain countered, "working with the legislative delegation today. You're going to get word that the Joint Bond Review Committee voted unanimous to fund $7 million for the Expo Center. I've been working on that."

Republican friends who urged her to run "saw me as a natural to bring balance back, that I can work with all sides," she said.

Bannister calls himself the better choice because "I reflect the values of the district; I grew up there, I know the issues that will affect it, and I have a personal stake" there in the form of a growing family and business.

But Shain said her community service, ties to economic development and education, which she views as inextricably linked, and her public record make her the better choice.

Polls will be open Tuesday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.