NASHVILLE -- All of the forces that make this autumn's midterm elections unusually incendiary across the country are converging here in the buckle of the Bible Belt:

This is Vice President Al Gore's home state, and yet the public disapproves of President Clinton by a startling rate of 64 to 36. The state has been enjoying its lowest unemployment rate in history, and yet people are uneasy about the future. Local chambers of commerce no longer feel the need to court new factories and branch offices, and yet business leaders are worried.

The nation's voters go to the polls Tuesday to select 36 governors, 35 senators and all 435 members of the House, but nowhere are the stakes higher than here, where two Senate seats, the governor's office and four competitive House seats are being contested.

Indeed, in this year of voter rebellion and negative campaigning, of glowing economic statistics and deep-seated economic anxieties, Tennessee emerges as the nation in miniature.

''If there's a 'Republican' sweep here, there's a wave across the country,'' said former Gov. Lamar Alexander, who already is preparing a campaign for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination. ''What is happening in Tennessee is what is happening in the country. People are troubled about the future, people think there's something wrong with our government in Washington, and they think that our values are being lost. The uprising is about that.''

The political future will be visible Wednesday from the porches of Nashville. The elections in this state will give shape to the political climate for the remaining two years of the Clinton administration and, perhaps, for the remainder of the century.

''Tennessee,'' said Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, ''is the whole thing.''

This state's congressional races will help decide whether the Republicans take control of the House for the first time since 1955. The fate of Sen. Jim Sasser, regarded as the favorite in the contest to become the Democrats' new leader in the Senate if he can survive a tough challenge Tuesday, will help determine the party's public face in Washington.

Moreover, the two Senate races here -- this is the only state where two seats are at stake -- constitute a critical battleground in the struggle for the Senate, which the Democrats are in danger of losing to the GOP.

''To retain the Senate,'' Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia said, ''the Democrats are going to need a couple of upsets.''

Right now, however, the Republicans are on the verge of capturing the Senate seat Gore relinquished when he became vice president. Fred Thompson, a former Senate Watergate Committee staffer and Hollywood actor who has been winning attention and support driving a blue Ford pickup across the state, has built a healthy lead over Rep. Jim Cooper, a moderate Democrat who won notice for offering a leading alternative to Clinton's health reform plan.

''This is a classic case where someone who has accomplished a lot outside government is up against a man who is a competent member of the House -- but who also represents a lot of the things people are fed up with,'' said William Lacy, Thompson's campaign manager.

Sasser's prospects, meanwhile, have brightened in his expensive contest against Bill Frist, a heart-transplant surgeon who has pumped millions of his own dollars into the race. The other day, three-term senator Sasser even risked putting the advantages of incumbency on display, a rare event in this year of fierce anti-incumbent sentiment, when he told workers at a Textron aviation-wing assembly plant of his efforts in the capital to keep alive the new V-22 helicopter.

All the while, however, Sasser stressed his populist impulses. ''I am a senator,'' he said, ''who represents the everyday working men and women of this state.''

Even if he prevails Tuesday, Sasser cannot become majority leader unless enough Democrats win to preserve their majority and he defeats Sen. Thomas Daschle of South Dakota in the secret leadership balloting Dec. 2 in the Capitol.

Tennessee politics usually has the air of a camp meeting, but this season it resembles more a demolition derby with too many contestants. Politics this autumn has been exciting and fast-moving, but it also has been difficult to keep all the races straight.

''Fred Thompson would take aim at Jim Cooper, miss him and hit me,'' Sasser said. ''We've gotten hit from shrapnel from those other campaigns.''

None of this would have happened in the old Tennessee. The state has been dependably Democratic since the days of Andrew Jackson, who lived in the Hermitage near here and gave the party its popular appeal. In the modern era, the Democrats' power was consolidated by Edward Crump, the fabled and feared boss of Memphis, and by three influential members of the Senate, Estes Kefauver, Albert Gore Sr. and Albert Gore Jr.

Legitimate two-party competition, in fact, has existed for only three decades, dating to when Howard H. Baker Jr., a Huntsville lawyer, and Don Kuykendall, a Memphis salesman, nearly won Senate seats in the Lyndon Johnson landslide. Since then, in dozens of statewide races for senator and governor, the Republicans have only won seven -- and five of those were won by Baker, who eventually won a Senate seat and became majority leader himself, or by his protege, Lamar Alexander.

''We've been waiting anxiously for our farm team to mature,'' Alexander said.

It has matured, both here and across the country. There was a surge in Republican fund-raising and in GOP primary voting this year. And this fall the Republicans are fielding their strongest candidates ever.

''This is the most competitive election cycle in Tennessee history,'' said Steve Gill, a Republican challenger who is taking on five-term Democratic Rep. Bart Gordon in Gore's old district in Middle Tennessee. ''People are running this time who have never run before.''

In truth, Clinton has bent the whole structure of Tennessee politics out of shape. Had President Bush been reelected, Gore would have remained in the Senate. Cooper would have glided to easy reelection in his House seat. The Republicans, not the Democrats, would have been on the defensive in midterm elections that customarily penalize the party that holds the White House. Gill, for one, admits he would not have run if Bush had remained in the White House.

The upheaval in this raucous political year has reached the state level, where a bitter gubernatorial race is under way between Nashville Mayor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, and Rep. Don Sundquist, the Republican. The two have argued about jobs, crime and a state lottery, and in the runup to the election they have even bickered over whether the mayor shoved -- ''thumped'' is the verb of choice here -- Peaches Simpkins, a Democratic activist who is supporting Sundquist.

Sundquist has been telling audiences that ''a real man wouldn't do that.'' For his part, Bredesen has accused Sundquist of having ''a terrible record on women's issues and civil rights,'' criticized him for accepting ''free parking'' and charged him with having a proven record as a ''do- nothing.''

The result is a political climate that is a lot like the slow-dance country music the fabled Stock-Yard Band plays in the Bull Pen Saloon in downtown Nashville: seldom uplifting, often depressing.

''The public is in an anti-incumbent mood, and that hurts Democrats,'' Nunn said. ''But it could hurt Republicans, too. All that negativism we're seeing in the campaign creates cynicism about the political system.''

In the final days, the negativism has continued, but the races have been tightening, just as they have been doing elsewhere.

''As they approach the moment of decision,'' Sasser said, ''voters are becoming less emotional and more rational about the choices they're making.'' Even so, they defy prediction, here and across the country.