HIGHLANDS RANCH, COLO. — When President Bush campaigned for reelection three years ago, this community near Denver was a promising territory: a fast-growing collection of cul-de-sacs and nearly identical homes, where thousands of young families seemed open to Republican ideas.
The "exurbs," the far-flung suburbs of Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Denver and other cities, were full of parents too busy with school, church and work to bother affiliating with either major party. GOP strategy held that, come election time, Republicans could win these voters with talk of lower taxes, stronger security and family values -- not only to help Bush, but to position the party for long-term dominance.
But talk today to Donna Howe, 49, a mother of two who backed Bush in 2004, and a dramatic setback to that plan emerges.
Like many of her neighbors, Howe is an independent voter who is frustrated by the direction of the country, nervous about national security -- and open to a Democratic candidate "with good ideas on healthcare and a reasonable plan to deal with the Iraq war."
The same holds for Jim Tuccio, 44, who lives a few streets away and blames Republican mismanagement of the economy for strangling the mortgage company he once worked for, costing him his job.
Unaffiliated voters, who split evenly between Bush and Democrat John F. Kerry in 2004, are now looking more favorably at the Democratic Party, a reaction to Bush's slide in the polls, the U.S. struggle in Iraq and other disappointments with GOP leadership.
It is a dramatic political development in such a closely divided electorate, and one that is likely to paint a different Electoral College map that for the last two elections was shaded Republican red in the heartland and the South, and Democratic blue in the coastal West, the Upper Midwest and the Northeast.
Strategists in both major parties believe the shift among independents was crucial to last year's Democratic sweep of congressional and state races in a number of traditionally Republican states, such as Colorado, Missouri, Montana and Ohio.
Here in Douglas County, the state's Democratic governor won nearly 50% of the vote last year -- a major achievement, considering that fewer than one in five voters here are Democrats and that President Bush had won overwhelmingly in 2000 and 2004.
