Florida. Bad news for Floridians this week as yet another storm pounds the erstwhile Sunshine State. Bad news, too, for John Kerry as the Republican chief of the state's Division of Elections announced that Hurricane Ivan could be used as a pretext for putting Ralph Nader on the presidential ballot despite a court order to keep him off. In other bad news, a September 14 Survey USA poll is giving George W. Bush a pretty substantial 51 percent to 45 percent lead. Last but not least, the president seems to have found yet another way to pander to hard-line anti-Castro Cuban exiles: going soft on terrorism.
The precipitating factor was Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso's decision to pardon four imprisoned Cuban exiles, including Guillermo Novo, who once fired a bazooka at the United Nations building, for playing a role in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro during a 2000 international summit in Panama City. After getting out of the slammer, three of the four (all U.S.-passport holders) got on a jet for the United States, where federal officials briefly interviewed them … before letting them go. Meanwhile, Kerry campaign officials are apparently hoping the administration's June decision to restrict travel and remittances to Cuba may actually backfire and help Democrats pick up support among younger, more moderate Cubans.
Maine. Two polls taken in late August gave Kerry the upper hand in the Pine Tree State. A Survey USA/WCSH-TV poll and the most recent Rasmussen Report survey both put Kerry ahead of Bush by 49 percent to 44 percent -- roughly the same margin by which Al Gore beat Bush in Maine back in 2000. A more recent Zogby poll, taken immediately after the Republican convention and released on September 9, however, places Bush and Kerry in a dead-even tie at 43 percent apiece.
Maine has a bizarre way of apportioning its four Electoral College votes: Winning the popular vote statewide does not necessarily translate into winning the electoral votes. The state's two congressional districts have one vote each. Votes are tallied by district, and the candidate who wins a district is entitled to that district's one electoral vote. The other two votes are automatically apportioned to the winner of the state's popular vote.
Since this system was adopted in 1969, no two candidates have ever split Maine's vote. This year, however a few turns of events raise the possibility that Bush and Kerry just might make Vacationland history. Maine's less rural, "Down Easter" first district is a fairly safe lock for Kerry. The real battle for Maine is over the sparsely populated hinterlands of the state's sprawling 2nd District. Gore won here by a mere 1 percent of the vote, and a new ballot initiative that would restrict "bear baiting" -- a method of bear hunting whereby a hunter lays bait for a bear and then climbs a tree to wait in ambush -- might lure the 2nd District's sportsmen and gun owners to the polls in record numbers this November.
New Mexico. Conflicting polls, increased ad barrages, campaign visits, and Ralph Nader have left pollsters and everyone else confused as to which way New Mexico voters will lean on November 2. One thing is clear, though: The race is extremely close here, one of a dwindling number of battleground states left on the electoral map. While Florida grabbed all the headlines as the nail-biter in the 2000 presidential election, it was actually New Mexico that scored the closest vote in the nation. Gore beat Bush here by a razor-slim margin of 366 votes, and election 2004 looks to be just as close. Then again, that all depends on whom you ask.
Rasmussen Reports conducted a poll at the beginning of August that showed Kerry with a 7-point lead over Bush, but a subsequent poll on August 18 showed the race to be tied, with both candidates at 46 percent. A different poll conducted by the Zogby organization on September 3 showed Kerry with a lead of nearly 10 percentage points over Bush. Yet another poll, taken September 1 for the Albuquerque Journal, showed President Bush to be leading the race in New Mexico 45 percent to 42 percent.
These studies all showed Nader to be polling around 1 percent, but that was before Thursday, when New Mexico Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron certified Nader's name on the ballot as an independent candidate. Democrats, worried that Nader's spot on the ballot could siphon votes away from Kerry, are planning to challenge Nader's candidacy. With Gore squeaking out a 366-vote victory, it's clear that Kerry will need every vote he can get here, and it remains to be seen how Nader's presence on the ballot will alter the race.
Both campaigns are at work on the ground and over the airwaves in the state. Bush's campaign upped its spending in New Mexico as part of an ad boost in four states narrowly won by Gore in 2000. Kerry's campaign, for its part, sent vice-presidential candidate John Edwards to Santa Fe to lead a town-hall discussion on health-care issues. Edwards has been to New Mexico several times in the last few months.
New Mexico would seem like an easy victory for Kerry and the Democrats, considering that the Dems have a 20-percent advantage in state voter-registration rolls, according to an article from the Santa Fe Reporter. However, according to those familiar with New Mexico politics, voters don't always vote on a straight party line, tending to focus issue by issue.
New Mexico has the highest percentage of Hispanic voters in the country (42 percent), and they tend to vote Democratic. Democrats are worried about voter disenfranchisement with regard to plans in some counties to require first-time voters to show identification at the polls.
With five electoral votes, New Mexico would not appear to be a heavyweight state, but consider Bush's margin of electoral victory in 2000: four votes
Pennsylvania. Barely a day goes by in which the fine folks of Pennsylvania aren't blessed with a visit from at least one major representative from the presidential campaigns. This week it's the battle of the ladies.
Teresa Heinz Kerry spoke in Scranton and Erie on Tuesday at health-care forums, where she laid out her husband's health proposals and did her best to capitalize on Pennsylvanians' worry and anger over pocketbook matters (1.25 million Pennsylvanians lack health insurance, and the state has hemorrhaged more than 150,000 manufacturing jobs since 2001). It'll be Laura Bush's turn on Friday, when she appears at a rally at East Stroudsburg University in eastern Pennsylvania.
The president made his most recent visit to the Keystone State last week, stumping on his economic record at a Christmas-figurine manufacturing plant in the Philadelphia suburbs. It's not clear if the Bush campaign was aware that the plant's owner -- an exemplary small-business man whom they'd decided to reward with a presidential visit -- had donated thousands to that nefarious, shadowy group the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as recently as August 20. No word yet if the president has filed suit with the Federal Election Commission against the guy.
Meanwhile, the polls show Pennsylvania to be a dead heat, which means Kerry has lost the small lead he'd maintained here for much of the summer. The CNN/Gallup/Washington Post poll taken over Labor Day weekend gave Bush 47 percent to Kerry's 46 percent, while last week's survey from Rasmussen Reports also has a 1-point spread, with Bush over Kerry 49 percent to 48 percent.
The state has largely tracked national polling trends, so with the race this close in the fall stretch, it seems clear that pavement-pounding and get-out-the-vote efforts could make the difference. A recent ABC News finding that 21 percent of Pennsylvanians report having been contacted by a Bush campaign representative, compared with just 14 percent saying they'd heard from the Kerry camp, isn't heartening news for the Dems. But Kerry's campaign can hope for supplemental help from Governor Ed Rendell's party operation and some of those “shadowy 527s” the president hates so much. Of the latter, one that's particularly worth watching is the Service Employees International Union-backed Partnership for America's Families, which made its first big splash here last year in an astounding feat of voter registration and mobilization for the Philadelphia mayoral race.
Washington state. This quasi-swing state seems to have already swung -- to the Democrats. Kerry has enjoyed a consistent advantage in Washington for the past couple of months, and according to the most recent USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, he still leads Bush here by 8 percentage points. With time and financial resources growing scarcer, you can bet that neither the president nor the senator will spend much more time in the Evergreen State before November.
But there is more to the Bush strategy than simply snatching Washington's 11 electoral votes. One part was politics: Bush's star power in Washington trickled down to help Representative George Nethercutt in his bid to unseat Senator Patty Murray. Indeed, Laura Bush, Majority Leader Bill Frist, Senator Elizabeth Dole and Vice President Dick Cheney all campaigned for Nethercutt. For a while, it was a hotly contested race, and one that the Republicans seemed poised to win. But no longer. Murray currently enjoys a nearly 15-point lead, and many Democratic analysts now seem confident that she will keep her seat.
The other part of the Bush strategy for Washington was tactical: Gore beat Bush by 5 percentage points here in 2000, so it was not ridiculous to think that the president could eke out a victory this year. Besides, the Bush campaign wanted to see Kerry spend as much money as possible in Washington, because they want to outspend him where it counts: Florida and Ohio. It's too soon to tell if Kerry will ultimately be more harmed than helped by a victory in Washington, but one thing is for sure: In the Evergreen State, it's all over but the voting.
Wisconsin. Wisconsin doesn't receive as much press as some of its slightly larger swing-state brethren, but the Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards (and even the Nader-Camejo) campaigns have made it clear that they consider it one of the most crucial states in the contest. In just the first two weeks of September, the four candidates from the two major tickets have all visited the state, as have Liz, Lynne, and Laura. Even on the rare days when none of the candidates is in town, the next seven weeks will feature a blur of campaign advertising here, as every organization from the Democratic National Committee to the National Rifle Association and Progress for America tries to shift a few votes.
All this attention is well-warranted, if the polls influencing the campaigns are to be believed. Yesterday's Rasmussen Reports survey was all but unchanged from the numbers two weeks earlier, showing a skimpy 2-point Bush lead. The more dramatic findings from this weekend's USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll data showed Bush winning in an 8-point rout -- but only after pollsters nudged “unsure” respondents into leaners. Unlike their counterparts in certain other swing states, then, Wisconsin Democrats have yet to begin panicking -- and neither party has any expectation of pocketing the state before November.
