It’s the turnout, stupid

As President Bush and Sen. John Kerry speed toward the finish line in this neck-and-neck race, campaign strategists say victory comes down to the candidate with the strongest voter-turnout operation in 10 battleground states that remain up for grabs.

The presidential marathon that lunges into its final hours is one of the most intensely fought elections in modern memory, and the most costly on record.

Each party deployed hundreds of thousands of volunteers in a precinct-by-precinct voter-turnout drive and poll-watch operation that strategists said was the most ambitious national campaign offensive they had ever seen.

Campaign strategists are closely watching key sectors of the electorate, including the large Hispanic vote that both candidates have aggressively courted, a divided labor union vote, and the Democratic-heavy black vote that doesn’t seem to be as energized by their party’s nominee as they were in previous years.

Notably, the election is taking place at a time when the mood of the voters is swinging back and forth in the polls, pulled and pushed by deep political divisions over the postwar operation in Iraq, the threat of another terrorist attack and an economy that has staged a solid comeback.

But when it comes to getting out the vote, both camps say they have the largest turnout organizations in the history of the modern political era, which will tip key dead-even states into their columns. However, Democratic pollsters conceded that Mr. Bush is closer to the 270 electoral votes he needs to win, while Mr. Kerry appears to be further from that goal.

Some electoral math shows the president leading in 28 out of the 30 states he carried in 2000, trailing only in Ohio and New Hampshire, which would give him a total 254 electoral votes, 16 short of what he needs to clinch a second term.

Florida, one of the key states where Mr. Bush maintains a slight lead, is still close enough to be put in the tossup list. But polls show Mr. Bush also has the edge in several additional states that then-Vice President Al Gore won in 2000, including New Mexico (5), Iowa (7) and Minnesota (10), which could put him over the top.

“The Electoral College still favors the president because so many things have to break for Kerry for him to win. Kerry has to win Ohio, but if Bush wins Wisconsin and Florida, where does Kerry go?” said Michigan Democratic pollster Ed Sarpolus, who had Mr. Kerry leading in his state. “I’m not saying I’m writing Kerry off, but if you are an oddsmaker, Bush has the shorter odds.”

Mr. Kerry ended the final week of campaigning ahead in most of the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic states, Illinois in the Midwest, and the West Coast states that give him an electoral base of 171.

But polls showed he was trailing or in a virtual dead heat in a number of other Gore states, including Pennsylvania (21), Ohio (20), Michigan (17), Minnesota (10), New Jersey (15) and Hawaii (4), battlegrounds whose 87 electoral votes would lift his total to 258, still short of what he needs to win.

New Hampshire (4), where he leads, but which remains a tossup state, would get him closer, but still eight votes from victory.

“I still think there is a basis for a five- to eight-point win, but it looks as if it’s going to be a very close race. I can see Kerry losing the popular vote and winning the electoral vote,” said veteran Democratic strategist Harold Ickes, who was President Clinton’s deputy White House chief of staff and a key adviser to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“There are so many factors in play here — the newly registered voters, how they will break and who can get their vote out in the battleground states. I think we are doing well in Pennsylvania and Michigan, OK in Minnesota, but Wisconsin is clearly a very volatile state,” Mr. Ickes said.

Changes in the map

Republican strategists, however, exuded cautious confidence as the race entered its final days.

“The Democrats’ electoral map is getting smaller and our map is getting bigger. The fact that the president is largely traveling in states that Al Gore carried four years ago and that we are playing on offense in Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, I think is very positive for the campaign,” Bush Southern strategist Ralph Reed said.

Even so, experts say that making any electoral-vote forecast is difficult because of the volatility of many state polling numbers, which often change from day to day, and also because several battleground states that both candidates once believed were in their column are still too close to call.

For example, polls show that heavily Democratic New Jersey and Hawaii, once considered safe by the Kerry camp, are now dead even. Colorado, where Mr. Bush has been leading consistently, is growing tighter, as is Arkansas.

The election — which has focused largely on Iraq, the war on terrorism, the economy and jobs — is expected, in part, to turn on two key constituencies that have been among the Democrats’ most loyal voting blocs: blacks and Hispanics. But there are signs in the final days of the campaign that suggested blacks were not as energized by Mr. Kerry’s candidacy and that Mr. Bush would get a larger share of them than the 8 percent he received in 2000.

A poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank, found earlier this month that Mr. Kerry has the support of 69 percent of the black vote, while Mr. Bush is netting 18 percent. Bush advisers dismiss that number as unrealistic, saying that they would be happy to boost their share of the black vote to 10 percent to 12 percent.

The Bush campaign has gone all-out to woo Hispanic voters this year, as have the Democrats. Mr. Bush won 35 percent of Hispanic voters in 2000, compared with 62 percent for Al Gore, but recent polls suggest that Mr. Kerry’s support among Hispanics may have weakened.

“Kerry should be concerned that his numbers among Hispanics appear to be anemic. We are finding the same in states like New Mexico,” pollster John Zogby said.

An estimated 7 million Hispanics are expected to vote this Tuesday, about a million more than in 2000, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

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The turnout battle

Bush campaign strategists are confident that they have a superior volunteer voter-turnout operation, especially in Florida and Ohio, a state they conceded was a tossup, but one that they could win by getting more of their supporters to the polls.

Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman was taking nothing for granted in his turnout operation. Earlier this summer, he ordered two dry runs in Florida and Ohio in June and August when turnout workers ran their phone banks and contacted lists of voters “just as if the election were being held,” a campaign worker said.

“We told all our coordinators that Saturday was ’election day’ and people walked the precincts county by county, counted voters, monitored the numbers of doors knocked on and offered rides to simulate our operation,” said another campaign operative.

But the Democrats and the Kerry campaign also have mounted ambitious turnout operations in the major battleground states, supported by legions of labor union workers and dozens of activist groups.

Turnout specialists say they have not seen this much intensity in a presidential election in many years and predicted a sharp spike in voter turnout on Nov. 2.

“It will be 58 percent or higher, equal to the presidential election of 1992,” said Curtis Gans, who runs the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “I don’t think there has been as emotionally intense an election since 1968.”

The long-held rule in presidential politics has been that a higher turnout benefits the challenger and works against the incumbent, but Republicans think this time the reverse will be true.

Early voting will be a decisive factor in this year’s election, something the Bush camp has been closely tracking, Mr. Reed said.

“I think we are going to have a very large turnout of our people. We are already seeing signs of that around the country — long lines, the numbers of votes being cast per day, per polling place,” he said. “Watch that closely.”

The voters’ mood

The election takes place in the midst of a contentious wartime environment, where polls show the country is deeply divided over Iraq and worried about the economy and jobs. On the right track-wrong track question regularly asked by pollsters, a majority of voters have said the country is moving in the wrong direction.

But there were signs that such pessimism was receding in the final days of this campaign. Pollster John Zogby’s daily national tracking poll found last week that 47 percent of voters now believe things are on the right track, compared with 46 percent who say wrong track.

Mr. Kerry has made the economy and a decline in job creation a major weapon in his campaign arsenal, saying that Mr. Bush was the first president since Herbert Hoover to have a net decline in total employment.

But unemployment nationally remains at a relatively low 5.4 percent and 36 states have jobless rates at or below that level.

The Labor Department’s state-by-state employment data show that unemployment fell in September in eight of 10 battleground states, including Ohio (6 percent), Florida (4.5), Pennsylvania (5.3), Minnesota (4.6), New Mexico (5.3), New Hampshire (3.5), Nevada (3.9) and Colorado (4.9).

Yet several other developments have further complicated Mr. Bush’s efforts to clinch a second term. Consumer confidence has fallen for three straight months against a backdrop of oil and gasoline prices that are more than $2 per gallon in many states. The stock market has been particularly volatile, buffeted by the uncertainties over Iraq and oil prices exceeding $50 a barrel, pushing the Dow to below 10,000, weakening 401(k) retirement plans and other worker pension funds.

The sudden reduction in available vaccines at the start of the flu season has given Mr. Kerry another issue that could alienate some voters, especially more vulnerable older voters, who turn out in disproportionately high numbers.

Ad it up

Both candidates spent nearly $40 million on TV ads in the campaign’s final week and more than $400 million on TV and radio commercials since the ad wars began in earnest in March. Another $100 million or more has been spent by conservative and left-wing groups on independent ads.

But both camps reconfigured their targets in the past week. The Kerry campaign pulled its ads out of New Mexico and Republican-leaning Colorado, as well as in Michigan and Oregon, while the Bush camp cut back ads in Maine, which seems to be firmly in the Kerry column.

Strategists on both sides said their ad spending in the final days is largely concentrated in seven battleground states: Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Minnesota.

But many of the most influential TV ads weren’t run by the candidates themselves, but by the many well-financed independent groups who supported them, including an ad campaign financed by liberal pro-Kerry activist groups such as MoveOn.Org, which pummeled Mr. Bush with attack ads on his policies in Iraq and on domestic issues.

Perhaps the most influential pro-Bush ad of all was mounted on Aug. 5 by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, spearheaded by John O’Neill, a fellow Vietnam Navy officer and critic of Mr. Kerry, who raised questions about the veracity of the senator’s Vietnam War exploits and the medals he received during his four-month tour of duty.

While the group’s relatively modest ad buy only ran in three states, Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia, it received millions of dollars in free media exposure on the Internet and cable-TV talk shows.

Those ads triggered a strong reaction during the summer, throwing the Kerry campaign on the defensive, and brought in additional contributions that financed succeeding Swift Boat ads that showed a young, long-haired, war-protesting Mr. Kerry accusing his fellow veterans of committing atrocities in Vietnam.

Labor unions

Organized labor will be running and financing a massive get-out-the-vote operation in key swing states that Mr. Kerry needs to win, especially in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Ohio.

But union members are not in lockstep with their leadership and the Bush campaign expects to get a larger percentage of the union vote than the 32 percent he got in 2000. Mr. Gore received 63 percent of the union vote.

“Our goal is to get 70 percent of our members behind Kerry and we are on track for that,” said Mike Mathis, director of government affairs at the Teamsters.

Mr. Mathis acknowledged that the Teamsters’ most recent poll “showed a fairly high number of undecideds, about 15 percent of our members. We have a lot of patriotic, socially conservative members.”

The Teamsters poll, conducted two weeks ago, found that Mr. Kerry had the support of 58 percent of its members, compared with 30 percent for Mr. Bush. Mr. Bush got nearly 40 percent of the Teamsters vote in 2000 and his campaign advisers think he will do as well this time.

Mr. Mathis said Teamsters officials have been surprised by the closeness of the vote in such big union states as Michigan, where the race is close, and in West Virginia, where Mr. Bush has held the lead.

“The two big unions in Michigan are the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters. They are kind of typical Reagan Democrats, a lot of white male voters, gun owners, socially conservative and very patriotic,” he said.

At the beginning of the Bush administration, the president made a major overture to Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, who visited the White House more often than some Republican leaders and backed Mr. Bush’s proposal to allow drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Hoffa “had hopes of a relationship with the White House, and actually liked the people we dealt with. But they did not understand labor unions. Clearly, Bush did not want to listen to him. He certainly wasn’t going to be bought off,” Mr. Mathis said.