Florida. The good news for the Democrats is that John Kerry has made inroads into the crucial Tampa Bay media market, the state's key swing area, and looks set to improve on Al Gore's 2000 performance. The bad news is that George W. Bush has made inroads into Florida's African American community, with statewide polling echoing several national results showing the Republicans doing almost twice as well among black voters as they did in 2000. The Democratic solution is to unleash the surrogates. Al Gore was in the state over the weekend and on Monday, starting in Jacksonville and Tallahassee in the north before making his way to more Democratic-friendly Broward and Palm Beach counties, hitting black church after black church along the way, waving the bloody shirt of uncounted votes in an effort to boost turnout. Bill Clinton, after making his debut appearance in Philadelphia, headed down to Miami.
The Republicans, meanwhile, are using their surrogates to target another key plank of the Democratic base: Jews. Former New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch have put their on-again, off-again feud aside to record pro-Bush radio ads, while conservative columnists have taken to claiming that Kerry has a secret plan to mend relations with Europe on Israel's back. Democrats are countering with some planned Joe Lieberman synagogue visits. Meanwhile, District Court Judge James Cohen ruled Monday in favor of Florida's Republican secretary of state against efforts led by Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler of Boca Raton to force the state to maintain paper copies of votes cast by electronic machines in case disputes arise.
New Mexico. Early voting has already begun in New Mexico, and both Kerry and Bush are continuing to focus attention on this battleground state that is, by some accounts, turning red. Bush became the first president to visit Alamogordo when he campaigned there on Sunday after waking up at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Kerry was in Las Cruces one day earlier while Dick Cheney spoke in Farmington. One Reuters/Zogby national poll showed Bush with a 50 percent to 42 percent lead here, but other polls say the state is much closer. Some Hispanic voters (42 percent of the electorate in New Mexico) have complained about irregularities at the voting booth. The Republican National Committee (RNC), meanwhile, responded to published numbers showing the huge amount of newly registered voters by saying that “Democrats … will cheat to win.”
Bush's campaign staffers from Texas, which is a lock to go for the president on election day, have been leaving their defenses at the Alamo and riding into “Little Texas” to campaign for Bush. Not to be outdone, Clinton will be coming out to New Mexico on Saturday to campaign for Kerry.
Nevada. If the 2004 election is to be decided by the courts, as many fear, Nevada is already tilting away from the Democrats. On October 15, District Judge Valerie Adair denied the Democratic Party's request to reopen voter registration after it was revealed that Voter Outreach of America, an organization contracted by the RNC, had torn up an unknown number of Democratic registration forms. Adair ruled that individuals could file suit if they believed their registrations to have been waylaid; one such suit has already been filed. Voters who don't discover that they're off the rolls until election day will still be able to file provisional ballots -- but chances are that only those voters who kept duplicates of their registration forms will be considered legitimate. Without knowing the number of voters affected, it is impossible to say yet what sort of impact this will have.
Legal worries notwithstanding, the two candidates are campaigning furiously for Nevada's five electoral votes. Despite a Knight Ridder/MSNBC poll showing a 10-point Bush lead a little more than a week ago, both camps are acting as if they put more stock in last week's Reno Gazette-Journal poll showing Bush's lead at just half the margin of error. Each of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates has visited Nevada in recent days, as have surrogates from Barack Obama to Jenna and Barbara Bush. Reno, somewhat surprisingly, is receiving much more of a sensory barrage than in past cycles; according to the Nielsen Monitor-Plus and The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project, Reno aired the third-most presidential spots of any media market in the country, despite being the 114th largest. While it ranks fourth for the Bush campaign and the RNC's coordinated spots, it ranks second for the Democratic National Committee (DNC), behind only Miami -- a sign that Bush may have more to worry about than just Clark County.
Pennsylvania. Kerry broke the 50-percent barrier in the latest Quinnipiac poll (taken October 16-20), which gives him a 5-point lead at 51 percent to 46 percent among likely voters (the spread was 49 percent to 47 percent in Kerry's favor in Quinnipiac's poll a week ago). Rassmussen's latest survey (taken October 17-23) gives Kerry a 3-point lead, at 49 percent to 46 percent. And, more importantly, not a single public poll, including that of the Republican firm Strategic Vision, has shown a tie or Bush lead in several weeks.
But that has not meant, despite rampant rumors and speculation to which Purple People Watch has contributed its share recently, that Bush-Cheney '04 is pulling out of the state and concentrating efforts elsewhere. A panoply of Bush allies are stumping across the state this week, including Liddy Dole, Barbara Bush, Bill Frist (all of whom visited the state Monday), and Zell Miller (hitting Scranton on Tuesday), while Dick Cheney hits the western county of Washington on Wednesday and the president himself attends rallies in southeastern Pennsylvania on Wednesday and Thursday.
What's the deal? The campaign could be looking at internal polls strongly indicating that the state is still winnable. Alternatively, it could just be that the campaign hasn't abandoned Pennsylvania because it can't afford to after scaling down its efforts in Ohio recently.
In the meantime, the Democrats decided to unleash their home-stretch campaign weapon -- a certain semi-recovered but always-smokin' former president -- at a gigantic Philadelphia rally Monday.
"From time to time, I have been called the Comeback Kid," a thin but energetic Bill Clinton told a crowd of thousands in Love Park. "In eight days, John Kerry is going to make America the comeback country."
Also in attendance at the rally was Pennsylvania's rough-and-tumble Democratic governor, Ed Rendell, who's currently brushing off howls of outrage from the state GOP over his plan to stack state bureaucrats and lawyers in county election offices on November 2 to monitor disputes and prevent voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. Republicans are particularly ticked off that a former legal adviser to the Kerry campaign is now serving as the top legal adviser for Rendell's election-monitoring project.
Wisconsin. Wisconsin is shaping up to be the new Ohio, meaning that Kerry can't win without it. It may have only 10 electoral votes, but it's a "must win" for Kerry if he loses Ohio or Florida, according to pundits the Internet over. Both Kerry and Bush toured the state on Tuesday trying to eke out every last vote. The most recent Zogby poll has Bush up by 2 percentage points in Wisconsin. But Zogby, and the other recent polls, neglect to gauge Ralph Nader's impact on the race here. A CNN/Gallup Poll from mid-October showed Nader with a 3-percent share of the vote -- not a small number in a state that Gore captured by less than a quarter of a percentage point. Nader is running as an independent this year, not as a Green Party candidate. Green candidates are relatively popular in Wisconsin, so the net effect of the third-party candidates could mean about 4 percent of the vote.
Compiled by the Prospect staff. Click here to read the previous edition of “Purple People Watch.”
