NASHVILLE — While Tennessee is not a presidential battleground state, residents will supply some “ammunition” Tuesday as Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama square off here in the second presidential debate.

“This is the town hall debate, so it’s the one where citizens are asking the questions,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat. “That’s a great thing to be doing in Tennessee.”

The debate, which airs at 9 p.m. EDT on major broadcast and cable news networks, will be held at Belmont University. It is one of three presidential debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

Unlike the Sept. 26 debate in Oxford, Miss., and Thursday’s vice presidential debate in St. Louis, Mo., questions for this event are not formulated by the moderator but by voters.

Participants are drawn from a pool of undecided voters in the Nashville area selected by the Gallup Organization, a nonpartisan polling firm. Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, the current host of “Meet the Press,” will select the questions to be used. Questions sent by e-mail also may be used in the debate.

“The format introduces what you might call a little more uncertainty in the process,” Vanderbilt University political science professor John Geer said. “You get more interaction with the crowd.”

Alan Schroeder, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, said the town-hall format will make it harder for the candidates to attack each other.

“You’re in the middle of a group of citizens and the point is to have citizens ask the questions,” said the professor, author of “Presidential Debates: 40 Years of High-Risk TV.” “You don’t want to do anything disrespectful of those voters.”

The Nashville debate comes at a time when a Sept. 22-24 poll conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research Inc. for the Chattanooga Times Free Press shows Sen. McCain, R-Ariz., leading Sen. Obama, D-Ill., by 55 percent to 39 percent in Tennessee. The poll of 625 likely voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

But nationally, Sen. Obama has the upper hand, leading Sen. McCain by about 5.8 percent, according to an averaging of 11 recent national polls by Real Clear Politics, a nonpartisan Internet Web site.

John “Chip” Saltsman, a former Tennessee Republican Party chairman who managed Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee’s campaign, said polling for Sen. McCain has been going in the wrong direction.

“Look, there’s no doubt about it,” he said. “It’s been a bad 10 days for John McCain.”

But the town-hall format is good for the GOP candidate, Mr. Saltsman said.

“I feel like he’s very good about taking questions from folks and saying this is the straight talk,” he said.

Tennessee Democratic Party Chairman Gray Sasser sought to build up expectations for Sen. McCain, calling the town-hall debate “really John McCain’s format.”

As for Sen. Obama, he said, “you’re going to see Barack Obama continue to demonstrate that he’s the one most ready to lead this country.”

Professor Schroeder said Sen. Obama’s “particular strength is that he is so cool under fire.” The Illinois senator, however, “maybe could afford to draw a sharper contrast. He was pretty agreeable with McCain the other night in a way that maybe didn’t serve him terribly well.”

Debates are an arena where style can trump substance and a candidate’s bored glance at a wristwatch or exasperated sigh can come back with a vengeance, the experts said.

“I’m one that believes that style matters more than the substance in how people evaluate debates,” Mr. Schroeder said. “I think the debates are really more of a way to measure the human qualities, the character, the personality, even seeing how these guys perform under pressure.”

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