Beaufort, S.C. — Mark Sanford is the Wal-Mart of retail politics: It’s impossible to imagine how he could be more efficient. And on what might very well have been his last day of campaigning, he was in top form, tearing across South Carolina’s first congressional district in a last-ditch effort to resurrect his rollercoaster of a political career.

It’s the kind of narrative that political reporters drool over; there’s sex, divorce, trespassing charges — an inevitable fall from grace, and a possible return to it, and the peripheral involvement of one of the country’s most famous comedians to boot. It’s hard to conceive of how the race could get better than this. And according to recent polls, it could barely get any closer. South Carolina Republicans consistently describe the race as “a jump ball.” So Mark Sanford is taking the Monday before the election pretty seriously.

His last full day of the campaign starts a few minutes after 7:30 a.m., when he ambles into Collective Coffee, a Brooklyn-esque joint in Mount Pleasant with concrete floors and lots of exposed wood. Sanford doesn’t drink coffee, but details like that never stop him from going anywhere voters might be. And in the minimalist java shop, he looks a little, uh, out of place. He sports (and, evidently, always sports) pleated khakis that are just a touch too short. When he walks they billow up and out to display a peak of socks that appear to be navy blue. He also wears shoes that kind of look like they belonged to a farmer in another life.

“They’re really awful-looking and Martha [his assistant] gives me a hard time about them,” he tells me, “but they’re really comfortable.”

Sanford talks to every person in the coffee shop. He leans against a high table to ask a guest about his work and, as the man tells him about private contracting, Sanford’s mouth hangs agape.

“That’s really cool!” he blurts out when the man is finished.

Then he heads over to the pair of baristas and leans against the counter, doing this odd hamstring stretch as he peppers them with questions about how long they’ve worked there and how busy the coffee shop has been. He wraps up the conversation with a sentence that will be his refrain for the day: “I’ll be rude and leave a card and say I’d appreciate your consideration tomorrow,” he says, grinning.

The exchange is pleasant, but it’s doubtful they’ll consider him. Before Sanford showed up, one of the baristas told me he won’t be voting for the former governor because he wasted “millions of taxpayer dollars” to see his lover.

“Infidelity is nothing to me,” the barista added.

After downing his large OJ, Sanford heads over to a Bi-Lo grocery store across the parking lot. At this point, Sanford’s entourage is tiny — it’s just him, Martha, myself, and the only other journalist present, Slate’s Dave Weigel.

It stands in fairly stark contrast to what I understand to be Elizabeth Colbert Busch’s modus operandi. On Sunday, she took a coterie of reporters and staffers on a canvassing trip through a Charleston neighborhood. She drove in her enormous chartered “ELIZABETH MEANS BUSINESS” bus and approached (as I recall) four homes over the course of about 30 or 45 minutes. One of the staffers carried her umbrella — it was pouring rain — and another carried a clipboard. There must have been at least ten people between all the reporters and aides, which made the door-knocking a bit reminiscent of those Publishers Clearing House commercials.

That’s not at all how Sanford’s morning goes. The four of us duck unannounced into Bi-Lo, where he chats up a few employees. A woman starts to take an iPhone photo of him from a few feet away, and he waves her down — he wants her to get a picture of the two of them, and she happily obliges.

“What do you do?” he asks.

“I’m a mom, a retired attorney, and I paint,” she tells him.

“Wow!” he responds.

She laughs. “I have the dream life,” she says.

“Don’t rub it in!” he retorts.

Two cashiers flag him to tell him he has their votes.

“I sure appreciate it,” he says (he pronounces it “shore”). “Thank y’all very, very much.”

If the folksiness is a pretense, then Sanford deserves an Oscar. At one point, an employee jokes about Sanford’s affinity for fritters, and he actually slaps his thigh while he’s laughing, and it doesn’t seem fake at all. Sanford is one of those people who claps and bobs up and down a little bit when he thinks something is funny, and he thinks a lot of things are funny. He responds to humor this way, consistently, over the course of the day.

For the next few minutes, he lopes speedily through the Bi-Lo. Martha always gives him a wide berth, and Weigel and I tail him like ducklings.

Once he’s worked his way through the grocery store and chatted with a few construction workers in the parking lot (they give him tips about drywall installation, of which he is extremely appreciative), he offers to drive Weigel and me through a nearby housing development called I’On. It’s “new urbanism,” he explains, and he really wants us to see it.

“I think you’ll get a kick out of it,” he says, adding that he’ll take us back to our cars afterward.

The neighborhood is interesting enough — Weigel and I both got kicks out of it, I guess — but more interesting was the conversation with Sanford. I asked him if he ever felt jealous of Colbert Busch’s bus (a luxury the Sanford campaign probably wouldn’t have been able to afford — between Colbert Busch’s own fundraising and outside groups’ expenditures, he’s been outspent by about 4 to 1).

He hesitates before answering. “Charter bus isn’t really my thing,” he says, pausing. “So the answer is no.”

He explains that if you have a big bus, you’ll fill it with people. And nobody wants to have a conversation with a politician who’s flanked by aides. If he’s tailed by a guy “with an earpiece and dark sunglasses,” people will clam up. He never worried about security as governor, he adds, pointing out that in our nation’s history, no governor has ever gotten shot. So he keeps his canvassing operations as lean as possible. Plus, the cost of a bus “would freak me out.”

“My view is, the larger the crowd, the fewer the votes,” he told me later.

By the time we get to Sanford’s next stop, the Boulevard Diner, his one-on-one canvassing is impossible. There’s a TV truck out front, and a few more reporters inside. Subtlety and speed will be out of the question. And on top of the reporters and cameras, he’s joined by former governor James Edwards and state representative Chip Limehouse, who was once a primary opponent but will now campaign alongside him for a few stops. Edwards is stooped and white-haired, sporting a navy blazer, crisply pressed khakis, and hearing aids. Limehouse is tall and hefty, with a receding hairline.

“This is a battle for this country,” says Edwards at one of the diner’s tables where he, Sanford, and a few other supporters sit down for a chat. “It’s not just a congressional race.”

“Exactly,” says Limehouse from across the table.

“This is a battle for this country,” Edwards repeats.

Later, he expresses additional concern about the possibility of Republicans losing the House of Representatives. He’s concerned about President Obama gaining unchecked power.

“He would readily step in and be a dictator,” Edwards tells a few reporters in the diner. “He’d love that.”

“A socialistic country or capitalistic country, that’s the options we have,” adds Limehouse.

“Yea, that’s what the battle’s about,” Edwards says. “He summarized it better than I could.”

They both say this race is part of a battle for the country’s soul.

“If we lose the House, we’re gonna lose America, lose the future of our country,” Limehouse concludes.

“It’s all over,” Edwards adds about that prospect. “It’s all over.”

That’s why they’re spending this sunny Monday morning ambling through auto shops with their candidate. They also head to a Whole Foods, where they triple-team unassuming shoppers in the produce and bulk-goods sections, reminding them to vote and asking them to consider Sanford.

At Whole Foods, Sanford bumps into a neighbor, Marion Sullivan. When Sullivan sees him, her eyes light up and she points. “You!” she says. Sanford laughs. Sullivan, a Democrat, will not be voting for him.

“We live in the same building,” he explains to the gaggle of reporters. “We give each other a hard time.”

She later expounds on that a bit.

“We pass in the garage and I tell him, ‘Please don’t embarrass South Carolina anymore,’ which he thinks is very funny for some reason, which I can’t imagine,” she says.

“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Why do you have Colbert Busch stickers on the front and the back of your car? And I said, because I live in the same building that Mr. Sanford does, and I wanted to be sure he sees it!”

Sanford seems to find the whole situation very amusing. There’s bobbing and hand-clapping.

That’s how it goes for the rest of the day. Edwards and Limehouse leave after a couple of stops, replaced by a few state-party leaders. Sanford keeps up with the same approach, popping into a variety of businesses — a UPS store, a pizza place, a cafe, etc. — without warning and generally to warm welcomes.

Generally. Not always. His three o’clock plan is to head for the Year Round Pool Company in Bluffton. About ten minutes before he arrives, a group of upwards of 20 people has congregated at the driveway to the business, waving Elizabeth Colbert Busch signs. Some of them yell “We shall overcome!” at passing cars, and at least one of them didn’t know Sanford was en route. The sign-waving session came together because a group called Liberal Ladies sent out an e-mail blast about an hour before Sanford’s planned appearance. At least one man is present, but it’s definitely liberal-lady dominant.

“We’re like a flash mob!” enthuses Diana Radcliffe, who lives in the area.

“It’s a flash mob,” reiterates Gloria Statham, another resident of the first district, to me. “Instant gratification.”

When Sanford and his entourage roll up a few minutes later, the former governor is all smiles. He tells me he had no idea they’d be here, but as soon as the car is parked he saunters over to the group, grinning.

“How are you?” he asks.

“Welcome, Mr. Sanford!” one hollers. “We’re so glad you’re here!”

He greets a few of them and says, “We’re just saying hello.” TV cameramen scramble to gather around.

“I’d just say this, I think this is what makes America great,” he says to the group. “We have a difference of opinion, and yet at the end of the day, we’re all Americans, we’re all South Carolinians. So I admire you all exercising your constitutional right.”

“I have just one question,” says a woman whose name I can’t find in my notes. “Would you vote for Elizabeth Colbert Busch?”

Everyone laughs, including Sanford.

“You still have time!” another yells. “You still have time! There’s still time! The time is now!”

“I will work on it!” he says, laughing. “I will study her today!”

“Welcome to Bluffton!” the same woman yells as he turns to head into the pool store.

This last day of campaigning probably won’t have changed the outcome of the race for Sanford, state senator Tom Davis tells me as we chat in the store while Sanford gabs with its owner. There’s only so much of a difference you can make in one day, he says, and the results are probably in the cards. But what else is Sanford supposed to do? Sit in his campaign headquarters and be antsy?

“I’m empathetic,” Davis says. “I certainly have been in his shoes before, in a contested race, and getting down to the end, and submitting yourself to the voters, and they render a verdict. And that’s always a very humbling prospect.”

If Sanford wins — and that’s as big an “if” as it’s ever been — it will be due in part to his tireless work at retail politics. And if he loses, it seems he’ll be pretty zen about it. Hey, at least people want to talk to him now.

“Any way you cut it, it’s been a blessing,” he told me early in the afternoon between stops. “I’ve been to a place and back, back from 2009, wherein, you were doing a much quieter chapter of life. And now to be out and talk to folks, you know, whether it’s the last day or the continuation of the process of politics, I don’t know, but, this is, like, a blessing to be out on a day like this, talking to folks.”

— Betsy Woodruff is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.