Yet a contrast is apparent in the two campaign's assumptions about how the election will be won.
"This is one time the two presidential campaigns have fundamentally different strategies about winning," said former Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan, now a spokesman for America Coming Together, a Democratic activist group.
Like the GOP, Democrats are mounting a major effort to identify and turn out base voters. But most top Democratic strategists still expect swing voters to decide the election.
One senior Democratic strategist said the party was anticipating a large increase in participation this year that could swell turnout to as much as 118 million -- more than 10% higher than the 105 million in 2000. The strategist said the party expected that much of the increase would come from independent and less partisan voters.
That assumption helps explain Kerry's tone in the campaign. For several months, he has focused more on reassurance than persuasion -- more on trying to establish his credentials as a centrist (especially on national security) than on articulating an aggressive case against Bush.
Similarly, he has concentrated his advertising on swing communities and emphasized positive messages in his ads (though independently funded groups supporting him have spent heavily on ads criticizing Bush).
This approach has stirred some quiet dissent among liberals. Some worry Kerry is allowing Bush to maintain the offensive in much of the campaign debate, and that the Massachusetts senator is not providing a contrast sharp enough to fully motivate the Democratic base.
But the Kerry camp, and many independent Democratic strategists, defend the emphasis on swing voters, arguing that antipathy to Bush alone guarantees a large Democratic turnout.
Bush strategist Dowd says the campaign is also anticipating a turnout increase, but only to about 112 million voters. And he's less certain than Democrats that the remaining undecided and persuadable voters will decide the result.
He noted that even though polls show most persuadable voters expressing pessimism about the country's direction, many of them are whites who regularly attend church -- a group that strongly backed Bush in the 2000 election.
It is an article of faith among political consultants in both parties that voters undecided late in a race trend against the incumbent. But given the conflicting impulses the polls find among these voters this year, Dowd predicted they would not break decisively for either Bush or Kerry. And many, he predicted, might not vote at all. In such a scenario, he said, turning out the party base would grow in importance.
