Home support falls for hopefuls Graham, Edwards

The two Democrats running for president next year who are also up for re-election to the Senate are losing support back home because of positions they have taken on the national campaign trail.

Sen. Bob Graham of Florida and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina have cast votes and made statements unpopular back home, and polls suggest both could be vulnerable if they choose to run again for their Senate seats.

A Mason-Dixon poll last week showed Mr. Graham with his lowest approval rating in more than a decade, while in North Carolina, Rep. Richard Burr, a Republican running to unseat Mr. Edwards, has steadily closed the gap between himself and Mr. Edwards in Raleigh News-Observer polls during the last six months.

Mr. Edwards and Mr. Graham have time before public pressure or, in the case of Mr. Graham, state law, forces them to choose between their presidential or Senate bids. And with the election more than a year away, they have time to rebuild from what they say is a natural dip in the polls at home anytime a senator from a moderate state campaigns among the country’s more liberal Democratic primary voters.

But Republicans are tallying up the votes and public statements and awaiting their campaigns.

“[Bob Graham] has given so many 30-second ads we wouldn’t know what to do with them,” said Chris Paulitz, spokesman for Rep. Mark Foley, a Florida Republican who is running for the Republican nomination for the Senate seat. He pointed to Mr. Graham’s support for a filibuster to block the confirmation of the first Hispanic federal appeals court judge and the senator’s opposition to the Medicare bill that passed the Senate.

And then there are Mr. Graham’s rhetorical attacks on President Bush, in which he questioned the president’s honesty and suggested he should be impeached for misleading the nation into war.

“The people of Florida are starting to realize that the man running for president is not the same guy that was a two-term governor and a sitting senator that a broad cross-section of Floridians were voting for,” said Paul Seago, political director for Bill McCollum, another Republican seeking the seat.

Last week’s Mason-Dixon poll showed Mr. Graham with 53 percent job approval — down from 63 percent last year.

For his part, Mr. Edwards faces similar poll numbers and the same questions about votes and rhetoric.

Visiting the site last week of the shuttered Pillowtex Corp. textile mill in Kannapolis, N.C., where 4,000 jobs were lost, Mr. Edwards had to defend his vote made several years ago to grant permanent normalized trade relations with China. Workers blame free-trade agreements for sending textile jobs overseas in recent years.

Mr. Edwards said he stood by his vote and urged that federal money be expedited to the laid-off workers.

But few episodes more clearly show the divergence between the national and local audiences than when Mr. Edwards told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s annual convention last month he was “tired of Democrats walking away from President Bill Clinton, who did an extraordinary job of lifting up and reaching out to all of the American people.”

Ferrell Blount, the new chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, said Mr. Edwards can expect to see that used in a campaign: “Bill Clinton — I don’t know if I’d go so far to say despised, but he certainly is not a revered individual in the state.”

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