NAPERVILLE, Ill. -- From a tiny booth at a festival here, a radio station host gave Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican candidate for Senate, a moment to make his pitch between plugs for free massages and the corn dogs being sold a few booths away.

"I'm the candidate who wants to spend less, borrow less, tax less" was all Kirk had time to blurt out.

Then again, judging from a sampling of those who encountered Kirk here, at this Chicago suburb's Last Fling celebration Sunday, it might have been enough. In fact, there might have been something to lose with even a word more.

Voters along these streets, which smelled of fried dough and clanged with carnival rides, seemed to share a mood about the coming elections: a low-grade grumpiness toward anyone who has anything to do with politics, an exasperation with the string of corruption claims that have dogged leaders from Illinois and, most of all, an obsession with finding a cure for the nation's economic tumult.

"I'm getting sick and tired of the politics - just get the job done," Cliff Olszewski, 50, a civil engineer, said after Kirk had shaken his hand and walked on.

In this close fight for the Senate seat once held by President Barack Obama, Olszewski and his wife, Mary, described themselves as reliable Republicans who cast their first votes for a Democrat in 2004 (and again in 2008), for Obama. Olszewski is part of a crucial - and, polls show, remarkably large - group in the race between Kirk and his Democratic opponent, Alexi Giannoulias: the undecided.

The landscape is complicated. Republicans hold no statewide offices in Illinois, and Obama remains, even in Kirk's estimation, "personally popular" in his home state.

And yet, the previous governor, Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat, was impeached over accusations that he tried to sell the Senate seat at issue in this campaign. The current governor, Pat Quinn, another Democrat, finds himself locked in a tight race.

"What surprises me is, it used to be when voters asked what party you were from, if you said Republican, they were done," Kirk said as he wandered the festival with A. George Pradel, the longtime mayor of Naperville who was once a police officer here. "Now, if you say Republican, it's almost like, ‘Hey, OK, I'm voting!'"

In this traditionally Republican part of the state, the ferocity of anger at the Democratic Party felt particularly pronounced.

In Frankfort, another suburb where Kirk appeared in a parade earlier Sunday, Keith Blais called for an end "to the same old Chicago crap" in politics and yelled to Kirk, "Take Congress back - take it all the way back!"

Sharon Wasko said everyone in Washington should be fired, adding, "they're too old - they don't belong there anymore."

None of which is to say that Kirk, a moderate Republican (who, Wasko may wish to know, is in his fifth term in the House), has a simple task. Along with calls of encouragement, Kirk was greeted with other tones as well: "RINO!" one man yelled (a pejorative acronym for Republican In Name Only), while another called out, "The lesser of two evils!"