AURORA, N.Y. – The ominous chill Republicans are feeling these days has little to do with October's blustery winds and everything to do with the big coattails Hillary Rodham Clinton and Eliot Spitzer bring to the top of the state Democratic ticket on Election Day.

With voters across the county signaling discontent with the Republican-led Congress and President Bush's administration, New York Republicans fear that three of their once-safe House seats are in jeopardy — out of 15 GOP seats nationwide that could swing the House to Democratic control.

"New York state is in a death spiral," state legislature candidate Tim Julian, a Republican, said at a recent political forum in Rome, N.Y.

At the top of the Democratic ticket, Clinton is enjoying the rosy warmth of job security. Former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer, the little-known Republican challenger for her Senate seat, is expected to lose big.

Similarly, Spitzer, the attorney general who built a headlines-rich career going after white-collar crime on Wall Street, is strongly favored to win the state's governorship over Republican John Faso, a former state assembly minority leader.

"It's not been a good year for Republicans, that's for sure," said Cherl Heary, organizer of a recent campaign event in this Finger Lakes town for GOP congressional candidate Ray Meier. "They're a little dispirited, thinking Eliot Spitzer is going to win, but that's why we call them, that's why we bring them out for the vote."

Meier is running to replace moderate Republican Sherwood Boehlert in New York's 24th Congressional District, a Republican stronghold for decades, although it has significant numbers of blue-collar Democrats.

Boehlert built a reputation as a moderate Republican who often bucked party leadership, particularly on environmental issues, and both candidates have sought to assume that moderate label. The Democrat in the race, Michael Arcuri, a district attorney, regularly refers to himself as a "Boehlert Democrat," though Boehlert has enthusiastically supported Meier.

To help the Democratic cause, Spitzer is planning to appear in ads promoting Arcuri and another upstate Democrat, Eric Massa, a retired Navy commander seeking to unseat first-term Republican Rep. Randy Kuhl.

The Meier-Arcuri district is gripped by economic anxieties over jobs and taxes. Even Republican candidates blast the state government, which has been led for 12 years by GOP Gov. George Pataki.

Heary, chairwoman of the Cayuga County GOP, said the state party has been of little help. Even in the middle of a furious campaign season, she said, she hasn't heard from the chairman in five months.

"The feeling you get is that you're on your own," she said, as guests filled the mint-green kitchen of the 1850s farmhouse where Meier thanked supporters for driving through a howling storm to see him.

For his part, Meier said the high expectations for Democrats could be a blessing.

"If it's a slam dunk, many on the other side may say, 'Why bother?' The state dynamic, I think, could cut either way in terms of voter turnout," said Meier, a 10-year state senator.

National parties are spending heavily on the race: $1.8 million by the Republicans, $1.1 million by the Democrats.

In addition to this race, Democrats have hopes of claiming seats held by Republican Reps. Tom Reynolds in the Buffalo area and John Sweeney in the Saratoga Springs region. As they consider a late-campaign attempt to enlarge the number of competitive races, party strategists are weighing a plan to send help to Rep. Jim Walsh's challenger in Syracuse, officials said.

With the outcome of her own race assured, Clinton is campaigning vigorously for Democrats in and out of New York, arguing that disenchanted Republicans can be persuaded to swing to Democrats.

In New York, she has devoted considerable time and fundraising help to Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democratic lawyer trying to unseat Sweeney after four terms in a race expected to be close. Gillibrand, who even looks a bit like a younger Clinton, praised Clinton as a mentor who has given "the amount of care that I really couldn't expect from any senator."

Asked about coattails, Clinton said Monday at a rally outside Albany: "I think it can motivate turnout. I think people who want Eliot Spitzer as governor, they're going to show up and they're much more likely to vote for Kirsten and for me, and I think that's great."

Former President Clinton is also pitching in, visiting the Syracuse and Albany area later this week to campaign for House candidates.

The national parties have spent some $300,000 each on the race.

Sweeney, whose district runs from the Albany suburbs north to Lake Placid, said he is campaigning against "the entire Democratic establishment," but he dismissed the idea that a Clinton-Spitzer effect could determine his race.

"We haven't seen coattails in a long, long time, and they usually are related to acts of war or other kinds of things," he said.

Like a congressional page scandal, perhaps. That's the not-so-secret subtext of another high-profile congressional race, in which Reynolds, chairman of the House GOP election effort, is being challenged by Jack Davis, a maverick millionaire who quit the Republican Party to run as a Democrat.

Reynolds is trying to overcome criticism that he did not act early enough to unearth the congressional page scandal surrounding former Rep. Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned amid revelations of his suggestive electronic messages to teenage congressional pages.

Later, Reynolds aired an apologetic TV ad, and the national Republican Party chimed in with an ad attacking Reynolds' opponent. But Davis' appeal is built largely on his scorn for free trade agreements he contends have crippled manufacturing in the district and across the country.

Though he has declared himself no friend of the Clintons, Davis nevertheless stands to benefit from the senator's breezy coattails.

In fact, says Gerald Benjamin, a politics professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, it may well be Republican voters who stay away from the polls.

"Entrenched incumbents can resist coattails, but in a year where there are national issues, and where the Republicans have weak candidates at the top of the state ticket, the question is whether Republicans just stay home," Benjamin said.