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  JOHN THUNE, South Dakota

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – John Thune's interest in politics was sparked when he was a freshman in high school and made five of six free throws in a basketball game. The next day, he met someone in a downtown store who commented that Thune had missed one.

The spectator turned out to be Jim Abdnor, then a House member who went on to be a U.S. senator. Thune ended up going to work for Abdnor a few years later, launching a political career that reached its pinnacle Tuesday when the 43-year-old scored a historic victory over Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

He is the first politician to defeat a Senate leader in more than 50 years.

"It just felt like a race that needed to be run, that Daschle needed to be challenged and that I could really make a difference," Thune said. "He wasn't listening to South Dakota anymore. He was listening to Washington interests."

Thune came painfully close to winning a Senate seat two years ago. He fell 524 votes short against Sen. Tim Johnson, a race that was seen by many as a surrogate battle between Daschle and President Bush, who helped recruit Thune.

"If you had told me two years ago that we would be doing this again this year, I would have said,`You're crazy,'" Thune said early Wednesday in his victory speech.

Thune jumped back into the game this year against Daschle, a dominant force in South Dakota politics for more than a quarter-century.

Thune grew up in Murdo, a small town in South Dakota where Abdnor saw the high school freshman on the basketball court in the 1970s.

"He was the kind of kid you take to immediately," said Abdnor.

Thune first went to work for Abdnor in 1984. Thune credits Abdnor for getting him started in politics, saying the former senator has been like a second father to him.

After Abdnor lost his Senate seat to Daschle in 1986, Thune followed Abdnor when he was appointed head of the Small Business Administration.

Thune returned to South Dakota in 1989 to become executive director of the South Dakota Republican Party. He decided to run for South Dakota's lone seat in the U.S. House in 1996, when Johnson gave up the spot to run for the Senate. Thune was considered an underdog to fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Carole Hillard, who was better known and had more money, but he won the primary and the general election.

Thune won re-election in 1998 and 2000, but pledged to serve no more than six years in the House. He appeared headed toward a campaign for the governor's office, but Bush and other Republicans helped persuade him to challenge Johnson.

Thune describes himself as a hardworking, competitive person with conservative values that are in line with fellow South Dakotans.

"I'm just a small-town South Dakota guy who wants to make a difference for his state and his country," he told The Associated Press recently. "I like to laugh, like to have fun. I enjoy hanging out with my family. I like being outdoors."

RICHARD BURR, North Carolina

RALEIGH, N.C. – Dewitt Rhodes first heard of Richard Burr in the early 1990s, when word got around that the appliance sales manager was thinking about a run for Congress.

"He was young and very impressive," says Rhodes, who has been active in local Republican circles for decades. "He seemed like he might have had the beginnings of a little fire in his gut."

Rhodes was right. Though Burr lost a run for Congress in 1992, he was elected two years later to the first of five terms in the House of Representatives as part of the Republican sweep led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Now, Burr has moved up to the U.S. Senate after defeating former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles for the seat being vacated by Democrat vice presidential nominee John Edwards.

"I believe North Carolina's been cheated in representation, and with such a long history of great senators I want to make sure that North Carolina gets back on track," Burr has said.

The son of a minister, Burr has parlayed his five terms in the House into real power, sitting on the Intelligence Committee and playing a central role in recent negotiations over a buyout of the federal tobacco quota system.

Burr, 48, represents a GOP-dominated congressional district that stretches across 11 counties in the northwest corner of the state. His conservative values have made him a key ally of the Bush administration, which encouraged Burr to run for Senate.

That also has brought the big guns out for Burr's campaign. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bush, Sen. Elizabeth Dole, and former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms have all campaigned for him.

Burr played football at Wake Forest University before spending 17 years at Carswell Distributing, where he rose to the job of national sales manager.

TOM COBURN, Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY – For conservative Republican Tom Coburn, running to the left in Oklahoma's Senate race meant lining up with President Bush.

Asked about his opposition to the death penalty, the former three-term congressman said he favored executions for "abortionists" and others who take life. At one town hall meeting, he said he had heard lesbianism was so rampant in area schools that girls could only go to the bathroom one at a time.

On Tuesday, Coburn triumphed over U.S. Rep. Brad Carson for the seat being vacated by Republican Don Nickles.

"I'm going to represent the whole state. I don't believe in retribution. I believe in reconciliation," Coburn said Tuesday night.

Coburn, 56, emphasized during the general-election race that he was a big supporter of Bush's tax cuts and the war in Iraq. At the same time, he had to fend off questions about why he backed Alan Keyes over Bush early in the 2000 Republican presidential contest.

The role of team player didn't fit Coburn's rhetoric in the primary, when he played up his reputation as a congressional maverick who helped lead a revolt against former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The reason: too many compromises by Gingrich with Democrats on spending issues.

Since he left Washington after three terms, Coburn said "things have gotten worse" with career politicians of both parties approving wasteful "pork-barrel" spending to get re-elected.

"My desire is not to be a U.S. senator. My desire is to change the Senate," he said.

Much of Coburn's campaign was devoted to painting Carson as a liberal whose election could hand control of the Senate to Democrats and put East Coast politicians such as Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton in key positions.

Carson, who campaigned as a moderate conservative, replied that "every politician in America is a liberal compared to Tom."

Coburn also had faced bad publicity from a 14-year-old lawsuit in which a woman accused the Muskogee doctor of sterilizing her without permission. Coburn said the lawsuit, which was dropped, had no merit. He also vehemently denied improperly filing for Medicaid reimbursement.

A longtime foe of abortion, Coburn specialized in delivering babies, more than 3,000 of them, during his medical career.

JIM DeMINT, South Carolina

CHARLESTON, S.C. – Although not widely known statewide, Republican U.S. Rep Jim DeMint was considered a shoo-in when he began campaigning for the Senate seat being vacated after almost four decades by the retiring Ernest "Fritz" Hollings.

Then former Gov. David Beasley entered the race. DeMint finished second in the six-candidate GOP primary to Beasley, but managed to defeat him in a runoff. DeMint again assumed the mantle of front-runner, but his lead over Democrat Inez Tenenbaum had all but evaporated by Election Day.

DeMint held on to skate past Tenenbaum, South Carolina's education chief, on Tuesday, in his first bid for statewide office. The race was one of the most expensive in state history, with the candidates raising almost $12 million between them.

Georgians, he said Tuesday night, wanted "someone who's going to go up there and support the president and someone who's willing to talk about some new ideas."

DeMint, 53, was born in Greenville where, as a young man, he delivered parts for textile machinery and unloaded railroad cars. He earned degrees from the University of Tennessee and Clemson University and is president of the DeMint group, a marketing research company.

Elected to Congress in 1998, he agreed at the outset to serve only three terms.

While in Washington, he introduced a bill to give workers the option of putting some of their payroll tax dollars into personal Social Security savings accounts. He proposed abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and replacing the 45,000 pages of the nation's tax code with something "simple and fair and transparent." One proposal would replace income taxes with a 23 percent national sales tax.

During one debate with Tenenbaum, DeMint said he supported a state GOP platform plank barring gays from teaching in public schools. A few days later, he added to the political fire when he said pregnant women with live-in boyfriends also should be barred from the classroom.

DeMint apologized for the latter remark.

"As my wife often reminds me, sometimes my heart disengages from my head and I say something I shouldn't, and that's what happened," he said.

JOHNNY ISAKSON, Georgia

ATLANTA – Republican Johnny Isakson couldn't be more different from retiring Sen. Zell Miller, the quirky, spotlight-loving Democrat who defied his own party and campaigned for President Bush. Yet their careers have been surprisingly linked.

Isakson suffered his first statewide political defeat at Miller's hands in the 1990 governor's race. Six years later after Isakson lost another statewide bid, Miller threw him the lifeline that helped restart his flagging career.

If not for Miller's help, "I wouldn't be here right now," Isakson said.

On Tuesday, Isakson was elected to fill the retiring Miller's U.S. Senate seat, trouncing one-term Rep. Denise Majette.

Isakson, 59, an Atlanta real estate executive, has held Newt Gingrich's old seat in Congress since 1999. Before that, he served 18 years in the state Legislature and chaired the state Board of Education.

Where Miller moves naturally to center stage, Isakson often prefers to do his work behind the scenes. Where the temperamental Miller can be a bomb-thrower, Isakson's first choice is to work toward consensus.

"I don't think you will see from Johnny as much headline-grabbing, but rather a pensive consideration of the issues," said former Democrat Gov. Roy Barnes.

Following the death of Republican Paul Coverdell in 2000, Barnes turned to Miller, his predecessor as governor, to fill the vacancy. Miller won election in his own right that year, promising to serve the interests of neither party but only of Georgians, increasingly estranging himself from his own party.

Isakson, in contrast, is generally at peace with his, though not as conservative on abortion as some within his party would like.

Isakson's career was at rock bottom after losing the 1990 race to Miller and a 1996 bid for the GOP Senate nomination. But then Miller asked Isakson to chair the new school board he was assembling.

"That allowed me to rekindle my interest in public service and demonstrate whatever my capabilities are," Isakson said.

BARACK OBAMA, Illinois

CHICAGO – During his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Barack Hussein Obama portrayed himself as a sort of one-man American melting pot, straddling racial and cultural boundaries.

"My name comes from Kenya, and my accent comes from Kansas," he joked, and he spoke emotionally of that dual heritage during his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Obama grew up on the beaches of Hawaii and the streets of Indonesia. He was raised by his white mother and barely knew his African father. He experimented with drugs and seemed headed nowhere, yet ended up excelling at elite universities.

Hardly the background of most Illinois voters. But he had the political skills and charisma to turn those differences into an advantage, walking over Republican Alan Keyes Tuesday to become only the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.

"What we have showed is that all of us can disagree without being disagreeable, that we can set aside the scorched-earth politics, the slash-and-burn politics of the past," Obama said Tuesday night.

Obama's father was a Kenyan student, also named Barack, who studied for several years in the United States. His mother was a white woman from Kansas who moved to Hawaii, where the couple met. But the marriage didn't last long. They divorced while Obama was an infant, and he met his father only once after that.

Obama, now 43, lived in Indonesia for four years as a young boy when his mother married again. In his time he often encountering stark poverty and illness.

Today, he says that helped him understand the struggles facing so many people around the world, "the literal desperation of making sure you have enough to eat."

When he was about 10, Obama returned to his grandparents in Hawaii to attend a private school. After a rebellious adolescence, he pulled his life together. He went to Harvard Law School, and was the first black president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

He moved to Chicago where he practiced law, and was elected to the state Senate. He went on to a legislative career that included creating a tax credit for poor families, expanding health insurance programs, helping overhaul the state's death penalty laws and requiring police to videotape their interrogations in murder cases.

His success doesn't surprise Christine Spurell, who worked with him, not always smoothly, at the Harvard Law Review.

"Black people need people like him," she said. "He reaches a huge range of people, and how can that not be a good thing?"

KEN SALAZAR, Colorado

DENVER – Ken Salazar is a soft-spoken, cowboy-hat-wearing politician whose rags-to-riches story began on the family ranch in southern Colorado.

The ranch didn't have electricity until 1981, but Salazar and his seven brothers and sisters all left the farm and went on to college. Salazar earned his law degree, got a job in the governor's office, was twice elected attorney general, and on Tuesday won a seat in the U.S. Senate.

He beat Republican beer executive Peter Coors after a nasty and expensive campaign, becoming the state's first Hispanic senator.

Salazar, 49, played down his ethnic background during the campaign, saying he wants to represent all Coloradans. He talked at length, however, about his family's rural roots, going back four centuries in northern New Mexico and 150 years in Colorado's San Luis Valley.

A married father of two teen-age daughters, Salazar told crowds at business luncheons, ice cream socials and bowling alleys that he was passionate about helping the middle class with jobs, higher income and lower tuition.

"At the end of the day, I think that the most significant difference between Pete Coors and myself is that I have walked in the shoes of the people of Colorado," Salazar told voters.

Salazar touted his grasp of national security issues and voiced concern for rural America while running ads that showed him behind the wheel of his Ford pickup truck.

In 1998, Salazar narrowly defeated a prominent Republican prosecutor in the attorney general's race. He won all but four counties when he ran again in 2002 after gaining wide support from law officers and environmentalists, who lauded his creation of the state's first environmental crime units.

Salazar also won praise from relatives of those slain in the 1999 Columbine High massacre for launching the only grand jury investigation of what authorities knew about the teen killers. But critics suggested the investigation was politically expedient.

DAVID VITTER, Louisiana

BATON ROUGE, La. – Louisiana loves old-fashioned politics: the glad-handing, back-slapping, joke-telling kind. Which is why the election of U.S. Rep. David Vitter as Louisiana's first Republican senator since Reconstruction stands out in this state's distinctive political culture.

True, this 43-year-old former state legislator ran as a champion of what he called "Louisiana values." But with degrees from Harvard, Oxford and Tulane, the conservative lawyer from the wealthiest district in the nation's poorest state has followed a trajectory as different as could be from that of the average Louisianan.

Tuesday, he was chosen to replace retiring Democrat John Breaux, whose easy-going dealmaking typified a culture that values conviviality.

But where Breaux compromised, Vitter is a partisan Republican who voted with his party 99 percent of the time last year. Where Breaux sought friendships across the aisle, Vitter tagged Democrat opponents, conservative or not, as "liberals" or "Washington liberals" or followers of the "Massachusetts liberal."

He's been on the attack since his earliest steps in politics. As a young state representative, he grabbed headlines and infuriated colleagues, firing off ethics complaints, pushing successfully for term limits, opposing gambling and pay raises, and setting himself up as the champion of good government.

Critics say he grandstands; Vitter puts it this way: "A lot of people say I rocked the boat. I usually respond by saying I tipped it over a few times."

Voters in the affluent suburbs of New Orleans sent Vitter to Congress in 1999 to replace the disgraced Bob Livingston, who stepped down over extra-marital scandals.

In the two congressional forays that briefly lifted Vitter out of backbench obscurity, he remained true to type, unsuccessfully pushing a bill to restrict the abortion drug RU-486 and then successfully barring the State Department from allowing the Chinese news agency Xinhua to use a building near the Pentagon.

More: Republican Mel Martinez declares victory in Florida; Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski leads in Alaska.

© 2004 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Editor's note: