Posted on 09/27/2004 8:55:34 PM PDT by Mike Fieschko
DES MOINES, Sept. 26 - They're off and voting in Iowa, even before all the corn has been harvested.
In the state's 20 most populous counties, which account for about 60 percent of the vote, more than 140,345 absentee ballots had been applied for as of last Wednesday, according to a survey of county auditors by The Des Moines Register. Under Iowa law, anyone can request an absentee ballot, no questions asked, and roughly three times as many Democrats as Republicans did so in the counties studied by The Register. Early voting began on Thursday, 40 days before Election Day.
Which is one reason Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, is optimistic about John Kerry's chances of carrying the state. Four years ago, Al Gore was outvoted at the polls; his entire 4,144-vote margin of victory in Iowa was from absentee voters.
If he is to win, Mr. Kerry can ill afford to lose states that Mr. Gore won, like Iowa and Wisconsin, two Midwestern battlegrounds.
Most polls show President Bush with a small advantage here (a Mason-Dixon survey, reported last week, had him up, 48 percent to 42 percent, with a margin of error of four percentage points), and both parties are still pressing hard.
On Thursday, John Edwards, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, spoke in Cedar Rapids in close-fought eastern Iowa, and two surrogates for Mr. Bush spoke in the same area last week, his wife, Laura Bush on Friday in Eldridge and Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, on Saturday in Davenport.
"At the end of the day, it's a very simple thing - Iraq," Mr. Edwards said, perhaps mindful of Iowa's long tradition of supporting antiwar politicians. "George Bush made this mess, and he can't fix it."
Mr. Vilsack said in an interview at the Governor's Mansion that that was the right approach - "a nice, tight strategy, with the candidates focusing on Iraq and their message reinforced by television ads and the daily pounding of the news from Iraq" - because "everyone knows what a disaster Iraq is."
Unlike the case with many other ranking Democrats, he argued that Mr. Kerry's timing was perfect.
"This campaign is like one of those classic John Elway games," the governor said. "The team with the ball at the end of the game wins. You can't surge too early, or you give the ball back, and you can't do that with Karl Rove and George Bush. They're too sharp. If you give them the ball back, they'll go down the field and score."
Normally, Iowa's seven electoral votes are not enough to attract the candidates' attention. This state's usual time in the political spotlight comes at the beginning of the campaign year, in midwinter, not toward the end.
Once the caucuses, Iowa's version of a primary, are completed in January, the state falls off the political map. But this is no normal year, and even small packets of electoral votes are very precious.
"It feels like ground zero here, and it has felt like that for nine months," said Kenneth M. Quinn, a retired diplomat who is president of the World Food Prize Foundation, based in Des Moines. "Both parties are clearly putting an enormous premium on the state, with a visit from someone or other almost every day and an endless barrage of TV ads. It's only seven electoral votes, but it could well be the decisive seven."
Mr. Kerry won the caucuses this year after Howard Dean faltered and Representative Richard A. Gephardt's broad labor support proved insufficient to carry him to victory. So Mr. Kerry is well known to Iowa's electorate, perhaps as well known as Mr. Bush.
But Dennis J. Goldford, an associate professor in the politics and international relations department at Drake University, said the Democrat had "run a remarkably incoherent campaign, which raises grave doubts about his ability to mount a comeback."
As for Mr. Kerry's emphasis on Iraq, Iowans are dovish enough, Professor Goldford said, but in the polls taken to date, "Kerry doesn't get the support of all the people here who think Iraq is a mess."
"To oust an incumbent,'' he added, "you have to make the point that he has created a mess. But you also have to show that you have the ideas and the gravitas to clean it up, and so far Kerry hasn't done that."
David Yepsen, longtime political expert for The Register, said he sensed another problem for Mr. Kerry, rural voters. Mr. Bush has been gaining support in the countryside, Mr. Yepsen said, "because there's a cultural disconnect between the chainsaw gang and the windsurfer," meaning Mr. Kerry, on religious issues, as well as social ones.
The number of farm families is declining precipitously, even in Iowa, but the number of rural voters, some retired and some with jobs in the city, remains highly significant.
So the Democrats' efforts to promote absentee voting could be crucial to Mr. Kerry. For months, they have been sending young canvassers door to door to interview people who otherwise might not vote. They have been searching, Mr. Vilsack said, for potential voters who have children serving in Iraq or who have lost jobs or feel trapped on an economic treadmill or who are worried about the mounting cost of health care.
"There are tens of thousands of people like that," the governor continued. "When the interviewer finds them, he encourages them to apply for an absentee ballot, helps them if they need help and punches their names and their concerns into a Palm Pilot. Then at the end of the day he transmits the information back to our database."
Phyllis Peters, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state, said that as of Thursday, 199,593 absentee ballots had been applied for through the 99 counties.
No one doubts the efficiency of the operation. Representative Jim Leach, an Iowa City Republican who described the presidential outlook here as "murky, fractionally favoring the president," said the Democrats' absentee effort was "the one thing that gives Kerry a better chance than the polls give him."
The Iowa Democratic Party, Mr. Leach said, "has now become the single best organized political party in the entire country."
The question is whether the Democrats will actually succeed in attracting voters to the polls who otherwise would have stayed at home, thus increasing their overall total, or whether they are simply churning the same pool of voters, persuading people to vote absentee who would otherwise have showed up to vote.
Some Republicans speculate that the Democrats want to lock up as many of their votes as possible before the televised debates begin on Thursday, in the event that Mr. Kerry does not do well against Mr. Bush.
One reason Mr. Gore may have run better among absentee voters, Mr. Vilsack speculated, was that most of them did not witness what were widely considered lackluster showings by the vice president in that year's debates.
David Roederer, the Bush chairman in Iowa, asserted that the absentee campaign "won't mean a thing" in the end.
"If you vote them early, you can't vote them late, because you only have so many supporters," Mr. Roederer said, expressing doubt that the Democrats could encourage many new voters signed up. "We're concentrating on Election Day, and we'll beat them there.
"If they get 40,000 more absentees, it won't be decisive. If the spread goes up to 100,000, of course, that would be a different story."
The Dimwits are going to try to steal this election. Considering, most of them don't even like Kerry, it's amazing.
That bothers me.
I hope the GOP has been working hard on getting absentee ballots out.
I wonder how many of those ballots are pre-punched?
Requesting an absentee ballot and returning an absentee ballot are two different things. This is pure posturing on the part of the DIMS.
I hope someone maintains a database on those absentee ballots to check for possible double voting in places like Florida or Pennsylvania.
I have friends here in Michigan who have told me that they have had several calls from the GOP encouraging them to vote by absentee ballot. They are in their 30s and really didn't understand the push, maybe this explains it. Get the votes cast during positive trends or before impending disasters.
small advantage, 48 - 42???
If sKerry was leading, 48 - 42 it would be described as a "decisive lead".
FWIW
This is pure posturing on the part of the DIMS.
I don't think so. Here in SD for the special election in June there was a significant battle for the early voters. Early voting lightens the load on election day when the system is swamped. We need to be battling the demorat camp every step of the way. The election is no longer "a day", IT IS A SEASON. That GOP official there in IA better pull his head out of the sand quick. EVERYONE SHOULD BE MOTIVATED TO VOTE FOR BUSH ASAP!
Possible Voter Fraud Alert.......PING
A little personal experience with Iowa fraud. Yes it exists. Yes it will happen. Yes the phoney state election guy (cannot recall demorat shiftys name) will deny such happenings--will not even respond to e-mails.
Bottom line--non U.S.citizens seem to be automatically signed up--and guess which party their voter card notes as party affiliation? These people (several) could not speak more than a few words of English, and had been here only a few months. Another immigrant family across the apartment hallway also had hit the voter lottery--all had cards. When I explained they were not elgible--one returned his card fearing a KGB like response.
I found it an affront to my citizenship for it dilutes the power of every legal citizen at the ballot box. If you assume only a fraction of new immigrants, legal and otherwise obtain such documentation, the Prez loses and we are cheated nationally.
This happened over a year ago, and couple that with the usual demorat proclivity to exclude military ballots, I am really frosted! Wake up sleeping citizenry.
Can you say "Voter fraud"? I thought you could.......
These votes will be tracked if the dems efforts are anything like they were here in SD a few months ago.
Julius Ceasar said men believe easily that which they wish to believe. Don't believe these aren't votes the dems are putting in the bank already. A am astounded by the cavalier response of the Rep. official.
" The Dimwits are going to try to steal this election. "
The GOP is letting them try, that's for sure. The first thing to do after 2000 was shore up our electoral system. But no.
B I N G O ! ! !
I have an up to date list of people in my county who have requested an Absentee Ballot, so I can hand address Bush literature to them. From studying the list it appears a majority of the D's who requested ballots are not 'new' voters. Many of them have been around as long as I have,,, and I got here when dirt was young.
In 2002's Michigan governor's race, we got our ass kicked by the absentee votes. It was a large part of the difference, if not all of it.
That would be rather difficult.
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