Public May Not Be Listening, But Campaign in Full Swing
May 10, 2004

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

If you don’t happen to live in one of 17 so-called battleground states for this year’s presidential election you may never see some of the big-money advertising that is designed to unseat President George W. Bush and replace him with a Democrat, presumptively Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

You may even live in one of the big-population states, such as California, Texas or New York, and you still won’t be exposed to as much advertising or the constant probing of a ministering media anxious to take the political temperature of voters. That’s because most political experts say California (55 electoral votes) and New York (31) are safely Democratic, which would give Kerry 86 electoral votes in just two states. Texas, the other really big-number state with 34 electoral votes, is considered solidly in the Bush column, as are several other states with fewer electoral votes. In all likelihood, some 33 states are expected to fall in the “blue state-red state” maps on TV in 2004 pretty much as they did in 2000.

But there is a group of generally-conceded battleground states which can go either way for a variety of reasons (see the chart which accompanies this column).

Most of the 17 states were relatively close in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote (and nine of these states), but Bush won the Electoral College. Five of them were won by a margin of less than 1% of the total vote. However, six of them weren’t all that close—decided by five percentage points or more. This year, they’re best described as “potential” battlegrounds; some may prove not to be.

ABCNews cautions that it’s a misnomer to call these all “swing” states, because that suggests they swing between Democrat and Republican majorities in presidential races. Some do: from 1976 to 2000, Ohio and Michigan each had four Republican winners and three Democrats, and Pennsylvania favored four Democrats and three Republicans. But others don’t: Minnesota has had seven straight Democratic winners. Arizona has voted for a Democrat for president just twice since 1948; New Hampshire, just three times; and, before Bill Clinton, Nevada hadn’t backed a Democrat for 24 years.

That’s were the race is really at: electoral votes, not popular vote. Al Gore narrowly won the popular vote in 2000, but lost the electoral vote. The current campaign plan for both parties is to win electoral votes, a toll determined by population. Each state’s Electoral College vote is equal to the number of seats in both houses of Congress—the number of seats in the House of Representatives plus two for the senators.

Electoral votes are redistributed after each census every 10 years, and they were altered after the 2000 census and election, reflecting population increases or decreases in some states. In 2000, Bush tallied 271 electoral votes—one more than needed. If Bush carries the same states in 2004, his 2004 total would be 278.

But will he win that kind of victory? Most pollsters and media commentators believe the 2004 presidential race will be as close as the 2000 race. The big approval ratings that Bush enjoyed in the months after the 9/11 attacks have been cut down recently, in large measure because of bread-and-butter issues related to jobs and family income, the drawn-out character of the war in Iraq, and the constant sniping of a small core of Bush-hating billionaires, like George Soros, and a left-leaning internationalist media.

Soros has poured millions into such Bush-bashing efforts as MoveOn.org which is running “soft-money” ads and building an Internet political machine that is also targeting the 17 battleground states.

The whole issue of soft-money and the so-called Campaign Reform Act is still much in the air. There are apparently enough loopholes in the law to allow Soros and others to try to shape the election their way. The National Rifle Association is hoping to use the “media loophole” by establishing a new daily news website and qualify to join the established media in being exempt from prohibitions on when ads can be run against candidates.

Soros and others are operating as a class of independent political organizations called 527s that are believed able to spend unlimited amounts of soft money whenever they wish to bash or support a candidate. But even as they are already running independent expenditure campaigns, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has been considering whether or not to impose restrictions on the 527 organizations. Most of these 527s, which are relatively new, support Democrats and Kerry. The Democrats think 527s should be free to do whatever they want. The Republicans take the opposite view. Naturally, the whole debate is related to whether the 527s can help you or hurt you.

Since the Bush campaign is seen to have a big edge in fund-raising, the Democrats are relying on the big-money donors to even things out by spending huge independent campaign warchests against Bush and for Kerry.

The FEC held two days of hearings on the restrictions question in April and is not expected to issue a ruling before sometime in May. However, what the FEC does or doesn’t do may not matter. Quite often the FEC decisions don’t become relevant until after an election when they can be enforced or ignored in the courts.

While the politicians, the strategists for each campaign and the media are deeply immersed in such issues, the public seems to be largely ignoring this year’s presidential campaign so far. In all likelihood, they won’t really sit up and take notice until after Labor Day. Of course, that’s what the ban on independent expenditure ads immediately before an election is all about: denying candidate ads at the time the public would be most receptive to pay attention.

But while the bulk of the country is not really tuned into the impending Bush-Kerry campaign battle, the independent ads, the media and the pollsters are up to their hips trying to pull answers out of the battleground states.

In many of those states, the campaign ads—including the official candidate ads and the independent campaigns like that of Soros’ MoveOn—are already in full swing. The candidates are already making stops there. And the media are sniffing carefully in every workplace or coffee shop like so many foxhounds.

In some of those states the national campaigns have already taken on a door-to-door intensity more characteristic of local contests. Volunteers in those states are being given tactical timetables and being required to meet those orders.

And in all of this early campaigning, issues like firearms civil rights are a key element. The Democrats are still trying to sound pro-gun while their records and their agenda still follows the same old anti-gun path.