At a mall food court here, where she was sitting with reporters covering her campaign for the House of Representatives, Imelda Marcos inserted iPod earbuds on either side of her bouffant coiffure.

Her life may already have been distilled into pop culture, her name reduced to a punch line about shoes. But a couple of months shy of 81 years, Mrs. Marcos is battling to restore the Marcos dynasty in nationwide elections on Monday, watching over a daughter running for provincial governor and over her only son, who is running for the Senate, a national office that the family hopes will be a stepping-stone back to the presidency.

She herself has been crisscrossing a rural district here in the north, the home of her late husband, Ferdinand E. Marcos, in a campaign that has been violent, even by Philippine standards. On a recent Sunday evening, she attended a fiesta where she was introduced as “still the queen, still the winner.” The next day, she comforted the widow of one of her campaign organizers, the fourth one to be assassinated so far....