Wrap-up: The bitter, larger-than-life Republican primary between Sen. Linc Chafee and Cranston Mayor Steve Laffey.

It's the race everyone in political America is talking about, many don't understand, and no one can predict.

Indeed, its unpredictability enhances its allure.

After millions of dollars spent by the candidates and their cacophonous out-of-state bomb throwers, notably Chafee's National Republican Senatorial Committee and Laffey's Club for Growth . . .

After all the attack ads, four debates, frantic stumping and contradictory public opinion surveys . . .

And after all the speculation about ideological purity within the GOP and whether this Senate seat from Democratic Rhode Island will turn blue in November and lead to a switch in party control -- anyone who tells you he knows what's going to happen on Tuesday, in a race where independents can stream to the polls, almost certainly has no better clue than you do.

Laffey exudes confidence -- well, he talks big. Perhaps you saw him tell ABC's George Stephanopoulos he's "100 percent" convinced he's headed to the Senate.

Chafee's side is hopeful about Tuesday, but hardly crowing. Press secretary Steve Hourahan, guessed Wednesday, "It's probably going to come down to about 52, 53/47."

Former Cranston Mayor Mike Traficante, a Chafee supporter, told me, "It's a lot closer than I thought it was going to be." Traficante is on the outs with Laffey but marvels at his "relentless" campaign skills.

On Thursday, Chafee was more upbeat than I'd heard him in some time. He said, "There's going to be a big turnout and Chafee's going to win. . . . I don't want to be arrogant or anything, but I'm confident."

He spoke from Washington, where he'd gone Tuesday for some Senate votes, and was about to head back here.

Traficante, who works for the Laborers' union -- which represented the celebrated crossing guards Laffey fired -- second-guessed Chafee's decision to spend several days in Washington instead of stumping in Rhode Island. "I'd be out there every second I could," he said.

Ironically, Chafee, the swing vote on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dodged a bullet on one item that had brought him to the capital. As the Associated Press reported, "Sen. Lincoln Chafee has pulled the plug on a push by his fellow Republicans to confirm John Bolton as U.N. ambassador, saying he had more questions that needed to be answered."

Laffey issued a statement calling Chafee indecisive and praising Bolton.

Although Laffey is boastful about his primary prospects -- indeed, he told The Washington Post that he'd go on to "crush" Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse in November -- his body language sends out another message: He is afraid of being thrown off message. He continued to brush off my efforts to interview him or to watch him campaign, even as he talks endlessly about how hard he works going door to door and how valuable it is to see what's on people's minds.

I sought to speak with Laffey on Tuesday. He was rushing out the door after appearing on Dan Yorke's WPRO radio show, on which he said I sometimes manufacture things in my columns. When I confronted him, he backed away from the manufacturing assertion. "But you have an agenda," he asserted. "I want you to talk about the issues that I hear when I go door to door." He said folks talk to him about energy policy and taxes. "I'm going campaigning, I'm not waiting for you," he said. It was 4 p.m. and he said he didn't know exactly where he was heading. "We're just going campaigning," he said.

Where would he be in the morning? "On a street corner somewhere," he said.

On Thursday, Chafee noted Laffey's frequent distancing himself from Providence Journal reporters, leaving them with quotes from, or relayed by, press secretary Nachama Soloveichik. Chafee asked, "Is that what he's going to do if he gets to the United States Senate -- hide under the desk?"

When Tuesday's results are in, pundits around the country will be quick to claim that:

Conservative Laffey has toppled the liberal Chafee, a mirror image of the ideological cleansing seen last month in Connecticut, where liberal Ned Lamont defeated the more conservative Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary.

Or, liberal Chafee withstood an aggressive assault from conservative Laffey and proved there's still room for mavericks in the Republican Party.

Laffey is more conservative than Chafee. He supports President Bush's tax cuts, is tougher on immigration, and backs the war in Iraq. Not to mention their differences on social issues.

But Laffey campaigns as a populist. His patter is a highly polished rage against "special interests" and "the Washington elite" and a recitation of tales of his youth in Cranston and administering a city that had been on the verge of bankruptcy.

With him, a Senate campaign is class warfare.

Millionaire Laffey, the investment banker son of a toolmaker and a nurse, obsesses about growing up amid sibling tensions and a shortage of money. Many of the glimpses he offers into his family's life, then and now, are vivid, and you may read into them more than is there.

Recall the TV spot in which he notes that a brother, who he has said elsewhere was a "promiscuous homosexual," died of AIDS. This may make you think that Laffey is sympathetic to gay marriage, but actually he opposes it. (He does back civil unions.)

The ad also shows his mom, Mary, and dad, John, and says the father has Alzheimer's. This may make you think Laffey wants to expand federal financing of embryonic stem-cell research, widely seen as offering the best hope for cures. But actually he doesn't, preferring instead adult stem-cell research.

On WPRO, Dan Yorke said of the ad, "It's uncomfortable to watch. Some people think that, you know, that your mom and dad have been kind of propped up as props."

Laffey, who reported that his parents wanted to appear in the ad, said, "Maybe it ought to be uncomfortable to watch." This is pure Laffey:

"You know, I'm knocking on thousands of doors and I meet people just like my mom and dad. I meet people who don't have any health insurance and I had to deal with crossing guards that got free health insurance. I meet people who struggle every day and I think about myself growing up. . . . I remember my mom working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. coming home and making a sandwich for us, convincing us that ketchup and mayonnaise was a sandwich. I may laugh about it now, but I remember those days when my dad didn't have a job . . . because of the foreign imports. . ."

Laffey also said, "I'm a fairly raw guy. If you want the old staid, some kind of Washington platform, you're not going to get it from me."

Laffey channels himself as, in effect, another Eddie Beard, the hardscrabble onetime house painter who served three terms as a Democratic congressman years ago. Of course, Beard never became a millionaire.

At other times, Laffey is reminiscent of the ultra-smart, heavy-handed Buddy Cianci, former mayor of Providence. I was reminded of this when Yorke asked Laffey about some criticism leveled against him by former Lt. Gov. Bernie Jackvony on Channel 36's A Lively Experiment. Laffey said dismissively that "25 people watch the show." Or "80."

I thought of the sarcastic Cianci's sneering in 2001 that he was tricked into appearing on Truman Taylor's Channel 6 show that aired at 11:30 Sunday morning, "when I have more people for a brunch in my apartment than watch it."

Chafee comes from wealth and married into more wealth. His late father, John, was senator before him, and, in a Channel 6 story on Wednesday, Laffey said Chafee feels "entitled" to the seat.

Does Chafee feel entitled? "No, the opposite," he told me Thursday. He noted that he began his political career well down the totem pole, by winning election as a Constitutional Convention delegate, then to the Warwick City Council, then, on a second try, mayor.

He added, "Someone's biography is fair game, and I'm proud of mine, but I don't wear it on my sleeve as much." He said he could spin lots of yarns, if you want to hear them, about his years as a harness racing blacksmith in Canada. He almost never speaks of his father, who was governor before going on to the Senate, or his mother, Virginia, the former Rhode Island first lady. "All that's important -- anything that can get a person to know a person better is beneficial -- but I'm just so proud of the work I've done in my elected positions." He said he's earned his Senate seat -- it was not, he said, as if he was "flopping around doing nothing" when his father died in 1999 and former Gov. Linc Almond appointed him to the post.

Chafee prefers greeting voters in supermarkets to going door-to-door in neighborhoods, because, he believes, he can reach more people this way.

Chafee calls Laffey a "demagogue" -- someone who exploits emotional issues -- citing as an example Laffey's attacking his vote for the so-called Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, a vote Chafee defends as being part of a carefully crafted highway package that benefited Rhode Island.

The senator also called "shocking" an expletive-filled 2003 voice message from Laffey that was the subject of a Journal story on Thursday. The message was for former Cranston Councilman Randy Jackvony -- Bernie's nephew --with whom Laffey had clashed.

Chafee said he could imagine Laffey having a heated conversation with someone in person but that leaving a message like that on an answering machine, where it could be heard by a spouse or children, was out of bounds. "This is the mayor!" Chafee said increduously.

Chafee said he'll win because voters see him as "steady, calm," someone who has shown "backbone and guts." He said they see Laffey very differently, as having a history of "antagonizing people of all stripes."

I'd say both men have antagonized people through the ugly primary waged by them and their allies, making it harder to build momentum for the Nov. 7 race with Whitehouse.

Good luck to Tuesday's winner. He'll need it.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal's political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com /(401) 277-7638