Swing states scare for Bush

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush has received a warning shot from the crucial battleground states likely to decide the outcome of the United States presidential election, where his rival John Kerry is now surging ahead.

Latest polls suggest Kerry leads the President in 12 of the 16 so-called swing states. In some the lead is slight, but in states such as New Hampshire, which Bush won in 2000, Kerry leads by almost 10 per cent.

Although any poll can offer only a snapshot in time, pollster John Zogby, who carried out the latest survey, said that if the present leads in these 16 states hold true - and Democrats and Republicans hold on to the states each party won easily in 2000 - Kerry will win with a margin of 102 college votes. In 2000 Bush beat Al Gore by just 271-267.

"I have made a career of taking bungy jumps in my election calls," Zogby wrote in a recent article.

"Here is my jump for 2004 - John Kerry will win the election ... We are unlikely to see any big bumps for either candidate because opinion is so polarised and, I believe, frozen in place. There are still six months to go and anything can still happen. But as of today, this race is John Kerry's to lose."

The battleground states - Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin - are likely to prove crucial in deciding who carries the day on November 2.

Both Republican and Democrat strategists accept that in at least 30 states, along with the District of Columbia, the outcome of the vote is a foregone conclusion. But in the battleground states - which were won in 2000 by six percentage points or less - everything is up for grabs.

Not surprisingly this is where both sides are focusing much of their efforts and trying to fine-tune their campaigns to reflect local issues.

There is little doubt that the polls will have severely shaken the President's strategists.

Some analysts attribute Kerry's surge to biographical advertisements broadcast recently in these 16 states at a cost of US$25 million.

Experts say they appear to have helped him to recover from a series of Republican-paid ads criticising his Congress voting record and questioning his national security credibility.

A recent Gallup poll put Kerry ahead of the President 49-47 - the third recent poll in which the two have been separated by less than the margin of error.

- INDEPENDENT