In one sign of shifting mores, James Knowles, a former Ku Klux Klan member who was convicted in a 1981 lynching, said in a Discovery Channel documentary by Ted Koppel that Mr. Obama was a potentially acceptable candidate. “People need to vote for him because of his ideas and the veracity that he displays in what he does, and not because he’s African-American,” Mr. Knowles said.

Image Bill White, the leader of a neo-Nazi group, last month in Roanoke, Va. He said his group was planning to deliver leaflets condemning Senator Barack Obama, but he was arrested last week. Credit... Casey Templeton for The New York Times

There have been only sporadic reports of racist mailings, though Democrats say they are on the lookout for more. And there has been scant evidence that Mr. Obama’s candidacy has helped hate-group recruitment, unlike the recent debates over immigration policy, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

White supremacist leaders, while threatening some political action before Nov. 4, similarly attribute their relative lack of activity this year to demographic and societal changes they cannot stop. But they also point to a Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, whose liberal immigration views and staunch support for Israel are against everything they stand for.

On top of that, the leadership is plagued by scandal and infighting in the absence of a unifying group like the Ku Klux Klan, which is no longer pre-eminent even among open racists, or figures like the former K.K.K. leader David Duke, whose power waned after he was convicted on fraud charges early this decade. (Mr. Duke has, in fact, written positively about the prospect of Mr. Obama’s being elected, though arguing it would stir a white backlash and “result in a dramatic increase in our ranks.”)

“There’s a real problem,” Mr. White said in the interview last month, “in what’s called the ‘white movement.’ One, there’s a lot of people who are just mentally ill, and we deal with those a lot. No. 2, there are people who have serious sexual problems.”

Mr. White, 31, who says he has a following of at least 1,200 people, considers himself a reformer in the white movement. A landlord of low-income tenants of all races, he devotes as much of his energy to attacking rival leaders he hopes to purge from the supremacist leadership as he does attacking Jews and blacks.