Hirono said the poll is good news for her campaign and said she believes many undecided voters are responding to her campaign message of "positive change."

"I'm just working hard until the very last day," she said. "The poll is a snapshot, and tomorrow is another day. I need more voters and votes, so that's what I'm doing."

Lloyd Yonenaka, a spokes-man for Lingle, said that the dead heat at this point in the race was not unexpected.

"We always felt this race was going to be a close one, and we are just dedicating ourselves to the next few days of this campaign to get out the vote and sway the undecided," he said.

Since Oct. 21, the Hawai'i Poll has been surveying about 150 likely voters every night. The latest numbers include 750 voters interviewed statewide Oct. 26 though Wednesday night. Because of rounding, the numbers don't equal 100 percent.

The poll numbers have moved little since late September, and do not appear to have been affected significantly by the televised debate a week ago, by endorsements announced in the past two weeks, or by the recent flurry of attack ads launched by both parties.

Hirono has been chipping away at Lingle's lead since summer, when the Hawai'i Poll showed she trailed Lingle by 15 percentage points.

When those who said they didn't know who they would vote for were asked to say whether they were "leaning" toward one candidate or another, 23 percent of the undecideds said they were leaning toward Hirono and 16 percent said they were leaning toward Lingle, with 61 percent still saying they didn't know or preferred another candidate.

Factoring in the "leaners" with those voters who stated a candidate preference, the poll found Hirono and Lingle even with 46 percent.

The "leaning" numbers should be viewed with caution because the margin of error is significantly higher in this group of voters, which is a smaller subset of voters than in the overall poll.

The ethnic groups most likely to say they remain undecided in the final days of the campaign were Native Hawaiian voters, followed by Filipino and Japanese voters. Caucasian voters were much less likely to say they are undecided, and overwhelmingly said they support Lingle.

Voters less than 35 years old, voters with a union member in the household and voters who said they usually vote for Democrats were also more likely than other groups to say they remain undecided, according to the poll.

The poll found that 40 percent of the voters watched the televised debate between Hirono and Lingle a week ago.

The debate appeared to reinforce people's existing attitudes about the candidates, but apparently didn't lead many voters to change their minds. Of the voters who watched at least 15 minutes of the debate, only about 3 percent said it caused them to change their minds about who to vote for.

The poll suggests Lingle fared somewhat better in the debate than Hirono, with 30 percent of those who watched saying the exchange led them to have a more positive opinion of Lingle. About 23 percent said they had a more positive opinion of Hirono after the debate.

Conventional wisdom has it that some voters, particularly Japanese American voters and Neighbor Island voters, may decide very late in the campaign who to vote for, or may be be reluctant to tell a pollster how they intend to vote.

Since Japanese American voters and the Neighbor Islands have been a mainstay of Democratic Party support over the years, political strategists expect that many of the supposedly "undecided" voters actually plan to vote Democrat, but are reluctant to say so.

Yas Kuroda, a retired University of Hawai'i political science professor who has polled in many campaigns, said the new data suggest the Democrats are gearing up for a classic come-from-behind victory.

"There is a possibility that some of those who did not tell you which candidate they are going to vote for may vote for Hirono more likely than the Republicans," Kuroda said.

On the other hand, Kuroda said younger voters "generally are not very well-informed. One of the biggest reasons why they say they don't know is, they really don't know, they don't have much of an idea about politics."

Voter research in Hawai'i also shows people who have less education are more likely to say late in a campaign that they do not know who they will vote for, Kuroda said.

The latest Hawai'i Poll showings are virtually identical to poll data from the final days of the 1998 campaign, when Lingle and Gov. Ben Cayetano were tied with 43 percent of the vote each. Again, about 14 percent of the voters said they were undecided.

Cayetano went on to win that race by about 5,000 votes.