Last update: November 1, 2004 at 8:41 AM
GOP defectors could tip state to Kerry
Published November 1, 2004
DES MOINES -- With both parties fiercely focused on getting their likely backers out to vote in Iowa on Tuesday, a new poll suggests that President Bush's support in this battleground state waned last week.
The tight race here could slip into legal warfare as soon as 6 a.m. today, when election officials in numerous counties begin unwrapping completed absentee ballots in preparation for counting.
Starting then, Republican leaders said, they will challenge any ballots cast by Democrats who they suspect were ineligible to vote. Democrats say they will be out in force to protect any votes from being unfairly tossed out.
Both camps are staging vast get-out-the-vote drives through phone banks and house calls. But holding the line on defections may prove the bigger challenge.
A survey released Sunday by the Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll showed 6 percent of Republicans said they were voting for Kerry, compared with 2 percent of Democrats voting for Bush. In 2000, when Al Gore won Iowa by about 4,000 votes, the same pollster reported that the two sides were nearly evenly split on lost votes from within their parties.
"It's going to be that kind of defection that will decide the race," said Ann Zelzer, who conducted the Iowa Poll.
Her survey showed that support for Kerry held steady last week at 49 percent among likely voters, while support for Bush dipped to 43 percent from 46 percent. The margin of sampling error is about 3.5 percentage points.
In Cedar Rapids on Friday, Don Palmer, a retired engineering manager and foot soldier in the Republican voter drive, got a taste of party disloyalty after he knocked on Sharon Wellington's door.
The voter profile assembled by the party on Wellington showed she was a Republican and a highly likely supporter of Bush, Palmer said. (The Republican Party bought mailing lists from the National Rifle Association and other conservative groups, and meshed them with other databases and county election records.)
But Palmer wilted when she told him that she supported abortion rights, blamed Bush for the national debt and anguished over Iraq for "going on and on, and I don't see an end." She said she will vote for Kerry.
Palmer said that in all, about 30 percent of the people the party had identified as likely supporters of Bush said they were voting for Kerry.
But Gentry Collins, executive director of the Iowa Republican Party, said that statewide the party was seeing very few defections, and he cited a poll released Sunday by Mason-Dixon for MSNBC/Knight-Ridder showing Bush ahead in Iowa, Florida and other swing states.
John Norris, who ran Kerry's national field organization and came to Iowa to help with the final drive, said Sunday that about 65 percent of targeted voters contacted by Democratic recruits said they were voting for Kerry, though modeling had predicted 55 percent would.
A wild card in Iowa could be the Democratic ally America Coming Together, which said that through last weekend it had 700 staff members and volunteers soliciting voters in 195 small towns where little campaigning had been done.
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