IOWA CITY, Iowa — "Iowa is the beginning and the ending," one proud politician said recently while musing on the looming presidential vote.
Iowans can be forgiven for having a somewhat inflated sense of their political importance these days. The state's Democrats, after all, were responsible for vetting the field of their party's White House contenders more than nine months ago and vaulting Sen. John F. Kerry on his way to the nomination. Now, with the presidential race nip and tuck in its final stretch, Iowans are among those squarely in the political spotlight.
Polls show the Massachusetts senator and President Bush are statistically tied in the state, leaving it on the short list of battlegrounds and targeted for lavish attention from both campaigns. Both candidates stumped in the state Tuesday in their quest for its seven electoral votes -- Bush in Mason City, near the state's northern border; Kerry in Waterloo, less than 100 miles south. Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, tours a chunk of the state by bus today.
Thanks to its first-in-the-nation caucuses, Iowa is accustomed to the national political spotlight -- just not this late in the election cycle.
The state had been predictably friendly turf for Democratic presidential candidates since 1988. That year, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis claimed 55% of the Iowa vote in his losing campaign -- a better showing than in his home state.
But Democrat Al Gore's victory in 2000 revealed changes in the state's political complexion. Gore won by a mere 4,144-vote margin, or two votes per precinct, as Republican canvassers like to say.
The key to the shift: Nearly two-thirds of the counties won by President Clinton in 1996 went Republican in 2000; most were in rural areas.
Bush's strength in rural areas has become increasingly apparent throughout the upper Midwest, a pattern that has put Wisconsin and Minnesota -- states with liberal traditions far stronger than Iowa's -- in play in this year's campaign.
In these states, the Kerry campaign is banking on a high turnout of supporters in the cities while anticipating tough fights for the suburban vote and losses in small towns and farm communities. In Iowa, that means Democrats hope to pile up votes in Des Moines, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa.
