Arizona. Senator John McCain's inevitable return to the Republican fold may have seriously undercut John Kerry's attempts to pick up his home state's 10 electoral votes. While the none-too-secret vice-presidential courtship of McCain boosted Kerry's numbers in April and May, the eventual reunion of George W. Bush with his most prominent Republican critic has dramatically reversed the incumbent's downward trend. This weekend's KAET-TV/Arizona State University poll -- conducted before the handover in Iraq -- depicted a substantial 12-point gap between the two candidates. As McCain more publicly takes up his role as co-chairman of Bush's Arizona re-election campaign, Bush's support among the state's independents -- 30 percent of the registered electorate -- is likely to increase.
Meanwhile, a fresh-faced young consumer advocate by the name of Ralph Nader is running for president -- perhaps you've heard? -- and into some trouble. In his increasingly shameless bid to stay on the November ballot, he's allied himself with a number of reactionary elements in Arizona politics and elsewhere. (Read the full story in Max Blumenthal's detailed account of Nader's Arizona shenanigans and Michael Tomasky's column on Nader's sharp right turn.)
Florida. A June 24 American Research Group poll showed that the presidential race in Florida is -- surprise! -- very close. Forty-seven percent of likely voters say they favor Kerry, while 46 percent like Bush. The May poll had Bush with a 47 percent to 46 percent lead, while he led 46 percent to 45 percent in April, and Kerry was up 45 percent to 44 percent in March. The good news for Kerry lies in the internals. He's up by a very healthy 51 percent to 38 percent -- a 13-percent margin -- among independents, the Nader vote has steadily declined from 4 percent to 3 percent to 2 percent, and Kerry's 51 percent to 44 percent favorability rating is better than the president's 46-46 split. Interestingly, fewer people (8 percent undecided) have made up their minds about the incumbent than about the challenger (4 percent undecided).
The challenge for Kerry is that while his 85-percent support among Democrats is essentially the same as Bush's 86-percent support from Republicans, Bush has attracted 11 percent of Democratic voters, while Kerry draws just 5 percent of Republicans. The upshot is that the largest bloc of undecided voters, 3.2 percent of the total, are registered Republicans, while just 0.85 percent of voters are undecided independents and 1.29 percent are undecided Democrats. Kerry needs to either draw pro-Bush Democrats back into the fold or else persuade the anti-Bush Republicans to vote for him instead of merely staying home.
Minnesota. Cloquet, Minnesota (population 11,200) is rolling out the red carpet for Kerry this week. The little city, which boasts a gas station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, last hosted a big-name politician when Hubert Humphrey rolled through the northeastern corner of the state as a senator. Kerry will arrive on Cloquet's centennial anniversary; it is the first stop of a swing tour through Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. "It puts Cloquet on the map," Mayor Bruce Ahlgren told The Associated Press. "Cloquet's really never been a destination."
Kerry campaign staff may be seeing more of small-town America in the coming weeks than they had originally bargained for. Recent polling commissioned by the Center for Rural Strategies and 8055 Coalition for Rural America shows that Bush leads Kerry by only 9 percentage points among rural voters in 17 battleground states like Minnesota. Democratic analyst Anna Greenberg, who worked on the poll, explained to The New York Times that while Bush still leads among rural voters, his margin over Kerry is not currently wide enough to win the overall election. Kerry can make inroads with rural Americans by hammering away at Bush's failed war in Iraq, as well as at the economy -- two issues that have negatively affected many of these small-town folks.
Oregon. Remember that Nader fellow who we introduced you to a few states back? Likes seat belts, dislikes the two-party system? Well, his Oregon campaign seems to be about as upstanding as his Arizona bid. Even after it was widely reported that two conservative groups, Citizens for a Sound Economy and Oregon Family Council, were phone-banking their supporters to get them to a Nader nominating convention -- with scripts reading “Ralph Nader is undoubtedly going to pull some very crucial votes from John Kerry, and that could mean the difference in a razor-thin Presidential election” -- Nader appeared on Lars Larson's right-wing Oregonian radio show to plead for help in making it onto the ballot. Nader ultimately secured 1,150 signatures -- slightly more than the 1,000 signatures he needed to get on the ballot but possibly not enough to guard against a likely Oregon Democratic Party challenge to the petitions (if it finds enough mistakes to disqualify 151 signatures).
In addition to encouraging Nader to siphon votes off Kerry's left, the Bush-Cheney campaign is working on the difficult endeavor of increasing turnout in the sparsely populated, predominantly conservative eastern half of the state. The first of its two tools is, of course, money. As Seattle-based pollster Stuart Elway told the AP, “Quite simply, Washington and Oregon are in play because Bush is spending money here.”
Although Kerry has proved successful at matching Bush's expenses, he will have a more difficult time countering the other prong of the strategy: an anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative likely to draw conservative voters to the polls in November. The initiative made it onto the ballot with imposing support, as nearly 250,000 Oregonians -- more than twice the number needed -- signed on to the Defense of Marriage Coalition's petition.
Pennsylvania. The Philadelphia Daily News may have gotten a little ahead of itself. On June 16, its editors scooped every other daily editorial page in the country by issuing the first official endorsement of the 2004 campaign -- about four months before the rest of the pack. “Unlike the current White House occupant,” the Daily News opined on its front page, “Kerry can lead America to a brighter, better future.” Since the endorsement, the paper's letters-section editors have taken obvious pleasure in publishing a daily assortment of praise and condemnation for the 1,800-word editorial, everything from “Thanks for getting ahead of the game” to “So, the Daily News has joined North Korea, the French, Palestinian terrorists and al Qaeda in endorsing John F. Simoes Ferierra Heinz Kennedy Kerry.”
Pennsylvanian voters as a whole seem to be similarly torn. Polls released within a day of each other by FOX News and Quinnipiac University described opposite Keystone States: In the FOX News poll, Bush led Kerry by 3 points and earned a presidential approval rate of 51 percent; in the Quinnipiac poll, Kerry was up by 6 points and 53 percent of voters disapproved of Bush's performance. An Independence Day visit from Vice President Dick Cheney is not likely to unify public opinion much -- as he recently reminded Senator Patrick Leahy, Cheney is not one for bringing people together.
Compiled by the Prospect staff. Click
here
to read last week's “Purple People Watch.”