By Joe Milicia
The Associated Press

GIRARD, Ohio - The candidate is a convicted felon serving eight years in prison for bribery and racketeering.

The campaign office has a desk, three chairs and one telephone. Signs and bumper stickers are piled on a couple of tables, along with a box of buttons that bear a photo of former U.S. Rep. James Traficant with a defiant look on his face.

"If anybody can win from prison, it's Jim Traficant," said campaign manager Jim Bunosky, a substitute high school teacher who arrives about 3 p.m. and leaves as late as 11 p.m.

Mr. Traficant, who was expelled from Congress in July, is up against more than a federal conviction as he seeks to be elected to a 10th term in the House of Representatives.

He's running in a redrawn 17th District against a 29-year-old Democrat who is a former staff member, and a Republican challenger who has been popular in the new portion of the district.

Mr. Traficant has swept aside political challengers over the last two decades, winning in the general election with as much as 91 percent of the vote.

He has built a legacy as the champion of the little guy, wearing denim suits and an unkempt hairpiece. His signature House floor rants often contained profane attacks on federal agencies, punctuated by the Star Trek phrase, "Beam me up."

He has said that if he wins Nov. 5, he will try to abolish the IRS and create an advisory board to oversee the Justice Department.

Running as an independent from the minimum-security Allenwood federal prison in White Deer, Pa., with a novice volunteer campaign staff will test the limits of his popularity in the heavily Democratic 17th District.

The redrawn district now stretches beyond the steel towns of the Mahoning Valley to Akron. That means Mr. Traficant will have to appeal to a new group of voters.

"I suspect he's going to run a little weaker in the newer part of the district," said Bill Binning, a Youngstown State University political scientist, who expects Mr. Traficant to get up to 15 percent of the vote overall.

"Part of the problem he has is he's not in the news cycle at all, and he's far away," Mr. Binning said. "But there's a lot of Traficant diehards out there."

"Everything that Jim Traficant stands for is well documented. All we have to do is provide a presence - let everybody know he's on the ballot and that we intend to win," Mr. Bunosky said.

Mr. Bunosky has spoken to Mr. Traficant once briefly during the campaign. "He said, `Hey, thanks for the work you're doing. Tell everybody else thanks too,'" Mr. Bunosky said.

"It's really odd. You've just got a group of volunteers thrown together here. It's a real underdog effort. A lot of time we're short of people just to maintain the office," said campaign volunteer Dennis Cunningham, who has never met Mr. Traficant.

Leo Glaser, 54, a juror who helped convict Mr. Traficant recently joined the campaign. Mr. Glaser said he is convinced Mr. Traficant was convicted on trumped-up charges.