Final days of campaign and it's anyone's guess

By RUPERT CORNWELL

CANTON, Ohio - Just maybe, in an America split into almost equal political halves, this is the place to be: the bellwether county in a bellwether state in this desperately close election thrown into even more uncertainty by the taunting video message from the country's loathed enemy.

As Canton and Stark County vote, it is said, so votes Ohio. And only twice in the past century has Ohio got it wrong.

So the poll in Canton's delightfully named newspaper the Repository (of truth, one presumes) was of particular interest. But interest was not matched by enlightenment.

Naturally, the citizens of Stark County are split down the middle. For what it is worth, John Kerry had 47 per cent and George Bush 46 per cent, well within the statistical margin of error - or "margin of litigation" as Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, likes to put it, referring to the armies of lawyers who are already conducting their first skirmishes, in Ohio and across the country.

And now there is Osama bin Laden's video contribution - the "October surprise" that could yet tilt the struggle on the campaign's final weekend.

In the countryside outside Canton, evidence of the division was everywhere, right down to competing Bush and Kerry signs on the same leaf-flecked front lawn.

"We're a cross-section of America," says Charita Goshay, a Repository columnist. "We've got town and country, industry and agriculture, liberals and conservatives, different income groups and different races."

If the states break exactly as they did in the 2000 election, Bush would win the electoral vote by 278 to 260 - a considerably wider margin than his 271-267 vote victory, thanks to adjustments in congressional districts to take account of population changes in the 2000 census, and a new weighting of individual states in the electoral college.

But if just West Virginia and New Hampshire, two small states which the President carried in 2000, changed sides, the outcome would be a 269-269 tie.

And that is only the start. In this hardest of elections to call, the Washington Post has calculated no fewer than 33 different, yet perfectly plausible, voting scenarios to produce deadlock in the electoral college.

If so, Blackwell's "margin of litigation" would become a "margin for chaos", with the election being thrown to the House of Representatives and intense pressure on individual state-appointed members of the electoral college to switch sides.

A few weeks ago such talk seemed purely academic. Bush swept out of his convention in New York with a double-digit lead in the polls, while the Kerry campaign seemed rudderless.

The candidate lacked a clear message and was failing to connect on a human level with ordinary voters.

But the presidential debates transformed the picture. By common consent, Kerry won all three. The combined 160 million viewers saw the challenger looking more presidential and possessing a deeper command of the issues than the man who sat in the Oval Office. Democrats were galvanised, and the race tightened into a dead heat.

Bush may be ahead by two or three points on the national level. But picking the winners of Ohio and other swing states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa is like a blind man throwing darts at a dart board.

Bush has not put his opponent away - but neither has Kerry managed to convince Americans that he would do a better job.

If that were not enough, the pollsters themselves admit to special problems this year. Their surveys miss entirely that section of the population, particularly younger voters, who use only mobile phones.

The prospect of an exceptionally high turnout, moreover, muddies that crucial distinction pollsters usually draw between registered voters and likely voters.

In Ohio alone, 500,000 new voters - an 8 per cent increase on 2000 - have registered.

Curtis Gans, head of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, thinks 118 million to 121 million Americans will vote this time, compared with 106 million four years ago.

Never in a presidential campaign has there been a greater risk of legal chaos.

Ohio is a perfect case in point. Blackwell, a Republican, incurred the wrath of Democrats by trying to clamp down on "provisional ballots" cast by new residents and voters whose names do not appear on the electoral roll, and by supporting polling station challenges against 35,000 Ohio voters whose registrations look suspect.

Democrats said the moves were blatant attempts to intimidate voters, especially in precincts with large black populations, and promised challenges of their own.

Yesterday Blackwell relented, urging both sides to drop their challenges. But if the legal temperature has dropped a degree or two in Ohio, it is still close to boiling point elsewhere, notably Florida.

No wonder many senior Democrats and Republicans privately echo the view of Gans: "I am praying we have a clear victor on election night. I don't care who. Otherwise Florida 2000 will look like a picnic."

But the passions are understandable. Has there ever been an election where so much is at stake?

There is the small matter of Iraq and the entire Bush doctrine of unprovoked preventive war, the re-emergent bin Laden and the global struggle against terrorism, the growing threat of nuclear proliferation and the estrangement of the US from old allies.

Never has the world watched an American election with such apprehension. Never has much of it so ardently yearned for an incumbent's defeat.

And that's just the foreign policy part. In domestic terms, too, the next presidency could be pivotal. Whoever wins will appoint two, maybe three, new justices to the nine-member Supreme Court. The court is the place where the battles in America's raging culture wars are won and lost.

Currently conservatives hold a fragile 5-4 majority. A Kerry presidency could give the court a liberal imprint for a decade or more; a revamped Bush court would be the most right-wing in generations.

Finally, there is America's gathering economic crisis - the increasing trade and budget deficits, soaring healthcare costs, and the looming entitlements crunch as the baby-boomer generation starts to retire.

These are momentous issues, and both parties have spent vast sums to get their views across. The presidential election alone has cost more than US$2 billion.

The conventional wisdom had been that in a divided country where everyone had long since chosen their side of the political barricades, victory would go to the party that better mobilised its base.

Could Republicans bring to the polls a good portion of the "missing four million" Christian evangelicals who, according to Karl Rove, Bush's master of the black political arts, went missing in 2000?

Conversely, could the Democrats persuade their natural constituencies of blacks, the poor and the young to vote in greater numbers? To both questions the answer seems to be yes.

Quite possibly, therefore, the competing get-out-the-vote drives have largely cancelled each other out.

In truth the endgame of this campaign hinges on a political species long believed almost extinct: the undecided voter. The Repository says they account for 6 per cent of likely voters in Stark County, and probably a similar proportion of the country.

Amazing but true, even in this polarised country, a few people have not made up their minds.

In normal years, the undecided usually break at the last moment for the challenger. But this year is not normal.

For the first time an election is being held under the shadow of terrorism. No one is sure which way they will go.

"This is wide open. I've never seen anything like this before," said Goshay.

She was speaking before bin Laden injected himself into proceedings, but her words are as true now - not only about her uncannily representative corner of Ohio, but about all America.

- INDEPENDENT