Minnesota. John Kerry will head here on Friday to unveil a new nationwide network of military veterans who support his presidential bid. The stop in the Gopher State is part of an 11-day trip to beef up Kerry's national-security platform, and it will include intensive voter outreach in the veteran-heavy battleground states of Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania, among others. In Minnesota, Kerry will hitch his wagon to the honored legacy of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, who used his position on the Veterans' Affairs Committee to push for increases in veterans' benefits.
His visit coincides with the release of a new feel-good ad that will air here, as well as in the media markets of 18 other key swing states this week. Let's hope it works. Al Gore took Minnesota's 10 electoral votes by a narrow margin of 2 percent in 2000.
Mirroring the rest of the nation, a recent poll showed Kerry and George W. Bush in a near dead heat in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. The poll, conducted for the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Minnesota Public Radio, revealed that 44 percent of Minnesotans would vote for Kerry, while 41 percent favor Bush. Two percent of those polled support Ralph Nader, while 13 percent were undecided.
Missouri. Bush may have 12-plus paid staffers here (compared with Kerry's one), but liberal groups like Americans Coming Together are filling in the gaps. So far, these groups have managed to sign up 55,000 new voters, "mostly in the Democratic strongholds of St. Louis and Kansas City," says MSNBC's Chris Jansing.
But wait -- there's more. Kerry's "can-do" ads started appearing on TV this week (as the ad puts it, we're a nation of "optimists and can-do people"), and the man followed: Kerry was at the Airline History Museum in Kansas City on Wednesday, and he gave a speech titled "Strengthening Our Military to Meet New Threats" on Thursday at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence. It's an appropriate site. As former Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton put it, "Truman would know that George W. Bush was a lightweight who got us into a mess in Iraq."
Pennsylvania. Back in February, Zogby International classified Pennsylvania, a state known for its volatile suburban voters, as a solidly blue state. The prediction seemed a little off come April, when a poll of Pennsylvania voters taken by Quinnipiac University had Bush leading with 45 percent over Kerry's 39 percent.
But, according to the most recent Quinnipiac poll released on May 27, the folks over at Zogby might not be so crazy after all. Support for Bush has dropped to 41 percent in the Keystone State while Kerry's has risen to 44 percent. Quinnipiac pollster Clay Richards points to the videotaped beheading of Pennsylvania businessman Nick Berg and charges brought against Pennsylvania soldiers in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, which have hit the state particularly hard, in explaining Bush's dip in support here. Richards' analysis seems plausible considering that Pennsylvanians' support of the war in Iraq has declined (from 52 percent in April to 42 percent in May) along with their support for the president.
New Hampshire. On the primary trail, John Kerry opined that there was no need for the Democrats to nominate a candidate with southern appeal. After all, Al Gore could have won the agonizingly close 2000 election by picking up any single additional state. Why look south, then, when red New Hampshire sits up alone in a sea of New England blue? On that theory, the Kerry campaign's chances are looking good: He held small leads in two May polls, which expanded to a dominating 9.6-percent advantage in a mid-May Zogby Interactive survey.
In even better news for the Kerry campaign, Nader, whose votes could have put Gore over the top in New Hampshire last time around, is running well behind his national poll ratings here and is said to be experiencing difficulty even getting on the ballot.
Meanwhile, Judd Gregg, one of the state's new Republican senators, felt himself compelled to break with the president on the issue of importing prescription drugs from nearby Canada, thus endorsing Kerry's stance on a hot-button issue.
Wisconsin. Kerry launched his foreign-policy tour in Wisconsin last week, stumping through the state from May 27-29. The visit was all military, all the time, as Kerry promoted his strategy for Iraq and held dinners and town-hall meetings with veterans. About 12 percent of Wisconsin's voting-age population are veterans, and the demographic is expected to significantly affect the outcome of the election.
Wisconsin papers glowingly recounted Kerry's warmth and understanding of veterans' issues. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, for example, recently profiled Alan Lewis, a 23-year-old Iraq War veteran who has now been visited by both Senator Kerry and President Bush. According to the Journal-Sentinel, “[A]fter Kerry questioned him at length about his treatment in military hospitals and his recovery,” Lewis told the paper that he “was able to relate to him more [than Bush] because he's a veteran.”
Notably absent from the coverage were the typical criticisms of Kerry's interpersonal skills. Instead, the papers commented on the senator's connection to veterans and military families, even poking fun at a poll saying that Kerry “wasn't the type of person a lot of people wanted to hang out at a barbecue with.”
The more serious polls, meanwhile, have varied widely. A May 18-23 Zogby poll found a solid 8.2-percent Kerry lead, one of the largest margins in a set of polls that showed Kerry taking 12 of 16 swing states. The most recent University of Wisconsin poll, on the other hand, gave Bush a 50 percent to 38 percent lead, with Nader occupying half of the difference. (Third-party candidates have a habit of influencing the outcome in Wisconsin. Although the state went to the Democrats in each of the last four presidential elections, three of those narrow margins were smaller than the votes won by Nader or Ross Perot.)
Compiled by the Prospect staff.
