Presidential campaigns hone winning strategies

DALLAS – Now, after a year of political jousting, six months of primary campaigning and two full weeks of partisan conventioneering – now, the presidential race really begins.

It is a rule of politics that campaigns begin on Labor Day, and however many months and millions of dollars already have been spent in pursuit of the White House, the combatants find themselves today in a ground zero of their own.

Despite a post-convention bounce in the polls for President Bush, most believe that the contest – a virtual tie going into last week’s Republican gathering – will tighten up again.

“This is a race that’s going to be very, very close,” said Matthew Dowd, the president’s campaign strategist. “And absent something adjusting it tremendously, it’s going to be very competitive until Election Day.”

If the main themes are terrorism and the economy, the strategies of both sides during the next two months will differ, according to interviews with principals in their campaigns.

The Bush blueprint seeks to energize base voters – including 4 million Christian evangelicals that White House political chief Karl Rove says did not vote in 2000.

John Kerry’s camp hopes to woo millions of so-called “persuadables” by challenging the president’s handling of the war and promising a better deal on jobs and health care.

The Bush appeal: Strong and steady leadership by the commander in chief. The Kerry counter: A strong America begins at home.

“They have concluded that their formula to win this election is to mobilize their base and get people who did not participate last time into the pool of the electorate,” said Kerry strategist Tad Devine.

“Our message and media,” he said, “will be broad-based, aimed at swing voters who have an economic agenda.”

Of about 20 battleground states where the race is close, four offer the richest cache of electoral votes – Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

And it is there that the candidates likely will focus much attention.

“If we win three out of four of those,” said Devine, “it is very, very difficult for the president to put this thing together.”

Moments after finishing his acceptance speech Thursday at center stage in Madison Square Garden, Bush boarded Air Force One bound for Pennsylvania. The last balloon had barely dropped in New York when Kerry took the stage at a midnight campaign rally in Ohio, skewering Bush as “unfit for office and unfit for duty.”

In the escalating drumbeat of the campaigns, advisers in both camps say different battleground states will pose different challenges.

Until the last few weeks, when hurricane damage has battered Florida, the state’s economy has been fine (advantage Bush), but it also has a growing Latino population (advantage Kerry). Yet, even among Latino voters, there are differences – Democrat-leaning Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans and historically Republican Cuban-Americans.

The task for the Bush and Kerry camps is to seek out their voters with a combination of tools – television, local radio ads, direct-mail brochures and targeted phone calls.

It’s much the same in Ohio, which is not so much a battleground state as a series of battlegrounds within the state.

In northeastern Ohio, part of the Rust Belt, the Kerry side plans an intense appeal to union voters by emphasizing local unemployment and the outsourcing of jobs overseas.

In southeastern Ohio, which is more socially conservative, the Bush camp has tapped Christian evangelicals by assembling voter lists from church directories, aired commercials for Christian radio stations touting the president’s religious faith and prepared a direct-mail attack depicting Kerry as wrong in his support for abortion rights and gay marriage.

Across the Buckeye State, Republicans have sought to duplicate the Democrats’ past success door-to-door, neighborhood-to-neighborhood.

The GOP has revamped voter registration efforts, signing up 60,000 volunteers, making 1 million phone calls and mapping an aggressive get-out-the-vote plan for the campaign’s final 72 hours.

“You’ve seen our focus on grass-roots, on technology, on the 72-hour effort. So these things are also important parts,” said Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman.

Bush won both Ohio and Florida in 2000, but Democrats say they see public uncertainty over the war in Iraq and economic discontent as an opportunity this year.

In Nevada, a small but important swing state, Democrats have tailored their appeal to a hot local issue. Last week, the Kerry campaign released a new television advertisement accusing Bush of breaking a promise to block the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

The GOP says it is massing an army of volunteers, and Democrats also have dispatched thousands of volunteers in recent weeks in swing states to register voters and assure they vote on Election Day. Democratic Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe said his party has an active program on early voting.

“The day those polls open in different states, we want to begin a massive operation and drive people to the polls early,” he said.

As a measure of the high-tech, high stakes this year, McAuliffe said the national party has a 170 million-name database and was sending 700,000 e-mails an hour at one point last week.

“We have placed $45 million in paid media (television and radio ads), and we have reserved a very substantial contingency to supplement that media buy,” he said Thursday.

“We’re not going to light up 20 states all at once. We’re going to start, state by state, media market by media market. We think we can have a very large battleground.”

In the calculus of the 2004 race, undecided voters account for about 5 percent of the electorate, according to most polls. But the universe of “persuadable” voters – those who are likely to vote and could go either way – ranges up to 20 percent of the electorate, according to polls.

Both sides say they want to win over persuadable voters; Democrats say they have an edge.

Polling indicates that these voters hold a more negative view than the average voter of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, his foreign policies, the economy and domestic initiatives. Nearly seven in 10 of them say the country is on the wrong track.

“They will break toward us,” said McAuliffe. “But they’re not going to do it yet.”

Supplementing the campaigns’ efforts are various allied groups.

The Bush-Cheney ticket has been aided by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose members are unhappy over Kerry’s 1971 criticism of the Vietnam War.

The Kerry campaign is benefiting from several independent groups, including the Media Fund and MoveOn, which have raised millions of dollars to target the Bush administration’s handling of the war in Iraq and the economy at home.

Ultimately, the candidates themselves are the marquee names of the election, crisscrossing the country in pursuit of votes.

“John Kerry will be working day and night in the next 60 days,” said McAuliffe. “He’s not going to come up for air.”

Likewise, Bush’s campaign schedule is filled with rallies, speeches and carefully scripted public events in target states where he brings the imprimatur of the presidency as commander in chief.

The candidates will meet in debates – probably three, although negotiators are still working out details.

“The debates are very important because this will be the first opportunity that the two candidates stand side by side and answer questions and talk about their visions,” said Dowd.

Last week, both camps were trying to manage expectations, each side portraying the opposing candidate as the better debater.

Campaign officials acknowledge that however hard they try, something unexpected can interrupt the best of plans.

Dowd calls it the “intervening event” – sudden bad news or good news about the economy, something in Iraq, a bobble in the debates, a gaffe on the campaign trial, a terrorist attack.

Last month in Boston, former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern recalled how, in 1972, his only hope against Richard Nixon was that George Wallace’s upstart candidacy would siphon sufficient votes from the Republican incumbent.

“When Wallace got shot, that was it,” he said, recalling his race long ago as he sat in the Harvard Bookstore. “When that happened, 10 million votes went over to Nixon.”

Sometimes, he said, the tacticians lay the best of plans, only to be undone by uncontrollable events.

The event that could decide the 2004 race, he said, might not even have happened yet.