Hyde Park, N.Y. — “We understand there’s a lot of waste going on in Washington,” says New York Assemblyman Jim Tedisco (R.), addressing a group of 50 or 60 people who’d volunteered on a Saturday morning to help get out the vote in Tuesday’s special election. “They’ve taken our money and they’re going on a shopping spree.”

That’s the sort of thing you expect to hear from a Republican politician. But Tedisco goes on: “Wall Street has done the same. We’re not only going to stand up to Washington and its waste, we’re going to stand up to Wall Street and its greed!”

This is the sound of a Republican trying to ride the backlash against Wall Street all the way to Congress. It is obvious from every speech he gives, every ad he runs, every press release his campaign puts out. Tedisco never forgets to remind his audience that his opponent is a venture capitalist. His final tour of the district’s ten counties is called “Miles for the Middle Class.”

Call it a new class warfare for the age of corporate welfare.

Whether such rhetoric brings Republican voters to the polls tomorrow remains to be seen. If it can work anywhere, it is probably the Hudson Valley. The extravagant Gilded Age Livingston-Mills mansion in Staatsburgh, just a few miles from here, stands today as a symbol of this beautiful region’s twin status as a playground for wealthy Manhattanites and a run-down home for economically depressed Upstaters.

This race will confuse those who expect Republicans and Democrats to fit neatly into simplistic pro- and anti-big-business categories. The Democratic candidate, Scott Murphy, is a wealthy and well-groomed capitalist who sat on corporate boards, approved bonuses for executives, and invested in India, creating jobs there. He exudes calm, confidence, and optimism, discussing his successes in business as a model for the career he hopes to have in public service.

“I’ve been able to make building businesses my life’s work,” Murphy told a crowd this weekend, speaking just a mile from FDR’s home. “We need somebody who’s going to go to Washington and work to solve our economic problems — work with people from both parties and implement good ideas.”

The Republican is a career politician, a state assemblyman, who talks about his time fighting the system in Albany on behalf of the little guy — most notably, fighting Eliot Spitzer over the issue of drivers’ licenses for illegal aliens. He speaks like a pit bull, firing up his crowds with populist invective against corporations.

“We’re not going to rubber-stamp billions of dollars going out the door, with caveats in it that says a company like AIG can spend $165 million of our hard-earned money to give those bonuses to the same executives that destroyed this economy and your 401(k),” Tedisco shouts, to cheers from a friendly crowd far more fired-up than the one Murphy addressed. “I’m not going to settle for that. I’m going to stand up against that when I get out to Washington.”

Tedisco excoriates not just AIG but also IBM, which employs thousand of workers in the Hudson region. The computer company was recently revealed to have asked for stimulus money even as it planned to outsource 4,000 local jobs to India.

Tedisco has not run the campaign of a typical conservative, and many conservatives in the state are underwhelmed. The battle in Congress over card check has seldom appeared in his rhetoric. When asked about whether he would have supported President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package, it took Tedisco weeks to offer a clear and unequivocal “no” — his biggest mistake in this campaign so far. After watching an early lead evaporate, Tedisco has campaigned as an underdog, attacking Wall Street Greed and his Wall Street opponent in every speech, and in one ad currently running on local television.

But Tedisco may also be on to something. Although Republicans enjoy a voter-registration edge of 75,000 in the 20th, the district has become much bluer in recent years than that number may suggest. President Obama narrowly carried the seat, and a Democrat, Kirsten Gillibrand, won it in two straight elections before being appointed to the U.S. Senate this year. Tedisco, despite leading in every poll until last week, has never enjoyed 50 percent support.

Republican voters’ unwillingness to back the party’s candidates has revealed itself in neighboring districts of upstate New York, as well. When Murphy spoke on Saturday, he was standing with Rep. John Hall (D.), who recently took over another formerly Republican seat in the area. New York has only three Republican congressmen today — out of 29.

“I think there has been a history of disgruntlement among Republicans here,” said John Tkazyik, the Republican mayor of Poughkeepsie (just outside the 20th district), who made the 15-minute drive here to help rally Tedisco’s volunteers. “But the way things are going now, with all of this money being spent, people are worried. Republicans are very motivated, and they’re gearing up here.”

Among the “geared up” Republicans on Saturday morning was 20-year-old student Albert Ames, who said this was his first time walking precincts for a political candidate. “I think a lot of people are very frustrated seeing what’s going on today,” said Ames. “All of these plans that the president and the rest of Congress want to put forward — it’s going to raise our debt another $9.3 trillion. That’s staggering. It’s insane.”

Republicans like Ames are not turned off by Tedisco’s populist push, but will it turn enough of them on to win a very close special election in which turnout promises to be low? There is a lot riding on that question. If Tedisco wins, RNC Chairman Michael Steele – who has made this race a personal priority – will have eased early fears about his competence. Republicans will have recovered a seat they lost in the blow-out of 2006. At a cost of more than $2.6 million from Republican donors, they will have earned a right to claim that their comeback is already underway — that Democrats in Washington have gone too far.

If Murphy prevails, Democrats will claim it as a ratification of President Obama’s entire agenda — deficit spending, energy taxes, and all. The GOP will return to the endless soul-searching, praying for a comeback that could still be several elections away.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been amended since posting.

– David Freddoso is a National Review Online staff reporter and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.