And while other people might write expressing views on the Iraq war or the economy, Dr. Toepel will have just one request: A campaign=0 Abutton, maybe a bumper sticker, even a pencil with the candidate’s name. Just something.

“I don’t know that I will say I’m a collector,” said Dr. Toepel, a 69-year-old retired elementary school principal from Sheboygan, Wis. “That I don’t emphasize. They might think that’s odd.”

Perhaps, but here in the ballroom of the Riviera Hotel & Casino at the 2008 American Political Items Collectors National Convention, Dr. Toepel has no such fear. He is joined by about 300 fellow aficionados who understand the appeal of gathering, studying and selling memorabilia related to politicians and who empathize with his frustration over owning items from every current senator but two. (Senators David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, and John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, are missing.)

Organizers say the biennial conference is particularly energized in this groundbreaking political year. Even stalwart Republicans acknowledge that items related to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, may become especially valuable if he is elected because he would be the first black in the office. A button, for instance, issued at Mr. Obama’s campaign kickoff in February 2007 sold for $150 on Monday, the first day of the gathering, which ends Thursday.

Even hobbyists opposed to Mr. Obama’s candidacy hope he inspires young people to collect. Mr. Obama’s likely opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona, is not drawing the same excitement; 22 members attended a meeting Wednesday to form an Obama specialty chapter, but two showed up for a McCain effort.

“I’d like to see people buying inexpensive $2 Obama buttons today, hopefully 10 years from now become interested in Teddy Roosevelt or F.D.R. or J.F.K. and maybe 20 years from now they’ll be interested in Washington and Lincoln,” said Rex Stark of Gardner, Mass., a collectibles dealer who sold a John Adams snuff box for more than $5,000 at the show. “That would be a good thing.”

Indeed, many collectors say a brush in their youth with a certain political figure or his legacy translated into a lifelong passion.

For Dr. Toepel, it was landing an “I Like Ike” button at 17 when he worked as a doorman at the 1956 Republican National Convention, which renominated President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

For Cary Jung, 54, of Sacramento, it was buying an L.B.J. pin for a quarter at the Kern County Fair in Bakersfield, Calif., in 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was running. And for a Long Island native, Adam Gottlieb, 44, it was a fourth-grade class trip to Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, N.Y., the home of Theodore Roosevelt.

While most of the attendees were over 40, a few were teenagers. Zachary Taylor, 13, of Milwaukee came with his grandfather because he has become a collector of items related to President Zachary Taylor, his coincidental namesake. And 15-year-old Will Giles of Avery, Tex., uses the money he makes as an umpire to buy memorabilia related to Charles Evans Hughes, the 1916 Republican presidential candidate and onetime chief justice of the United States.

Political persuasions may kick off an interest, but many collections become somewhat bipartisan. Such was the case for Howard Park, 49, of Washington, a Democrat who wore a polo shirt handed out for Vice President Al Gore’s appearance in New Mexico in 1996 under an open button-down shirt adorned with dozens of buttons, including a Ronald Reagan button he had bought for $55 earlier in the day.

“I bought it because Reagan is one of those people who, whether I like it or not, is always going to be worth something,” Mr. Park said. “A Michael Dukakis button or a John Kerry button, those are kind of down these days because they didn’t really mean as much to the political tide of history as, say, Barry Goldwater or even a George McGovern.”

Offbeat items were omnipresent. One collection on display included a Mike Huckabee guitar pick, a Hillary Rodham Clinton change purse and a DVD put out by John Edwards’s campaign this year, narrated by former Representative Ben Jones, who played Cooter on the “Dukes of Hazzard” television series.

Dr. Toepel says he is rooting for Mr. McCain for two reasons: He prefers the Republican, and he recently got the senator to sign a copy of Newsweek that had Mr. McCain on the cover.