With the Republican Party's anointed candidate for the U.S. Senate suspending his campaign, the primary election field is left open to five little-known GOP contenders.

The sidelining of motivational speaker Jerry Coffee even before his campaign got off the ground dims the slim chances of a Republican replacing Sen. Daniel Akaka.

Coffee, 72, a former Vietnam prisoner of war supported by Gov. Linda Lingle, cut short his campaign last week after undergoing heart bypass surgery.

The remaining Republican candidates have little going for them beyond blind optimism.

But that's exactly what keeps some of them in the race.

"Look at the list of people who can win this. It's like a lottery ticket," said Republican candidate and attorney Jay Friedheim. "This is competitive, and guess what? I've got a ticket."

Both parties' nominees will be decided in the Sept. 23 primaries, and the winners will face off in the Nov. 7 general election.

On the Democratic side, the race is on between Akaka and Rep. Ed Case, who's giving up his seat in Congress.

On the Republican side, it's unclear whether Coffee will be able to recover enough to restart his campaign, said his son, Jerry Coffee Jr.

"There's no serious Republican candidate running for Senate," said Ira Rohter, a University of Hawai'i political scientist. "I don't think there's any question. We don't even know who the Republican challengers are."

The six Republican candidates who have filed for the Senate include Coffee, Friedheim, attorney Mark Beatty, consultant Steve Tataii, former cowboy Chas Collins and businessman Eddie Pirkowski.

The Republican wannabes have a varied list of campaign themes.

"Akaka is no longer fit to be a U.S. Senator," said Beatty, a former paratrooper who wants to improve Hawai'i's public education system and fight drug use on the Islands.

He called Akaka "an ineffective and incompetent puppet of (Sen.) Dan Inouye."

Friedheim, 57, said he wants to start a draft that would compel citizens to either do public service, assist with natural disasters or enroll in the military.

"It's time for people to get together if we want to keep the freedoms we've had for the last 200 years," he said. "We don't have a single person to waste."

Tataii, 56, wants to use his Kurdish heritage to resolve conflicts in the Middle Eastern area of Kurdistan, which includes parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.

"My key interest is to try and come up with some kind of plan to help the Kurds in South Kurdistan become independent," he said.

Collins wants to protect the Earth and seek peace, according to his profile on the state elections Web page.

Pirkowski's goals are to reduce taxes, create a statewide budget surplus and seek resource independence for the Hawaiian Islands.