DAVENPORT, IOWA — With little more than three weeks before election day, John McCain made the surprising decision to campaign Saturday in Iowa -- a state he largely spurned in the 2000 and 2008 presidential caucuses and where he is trailing his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, by more than 10 percentage points.
During a midday rally here, the Republican nominee pulled no punches about his position and vowed to change it.
"The political pundits have been wrong several times, and they're wrong, because we will win the state of Iowa," McCain told more than 1,000 people in Davenport's RiverCenter.
"If we see a poll that shows us a little bit behind, that means we're going to fight harder."
But the Hawkeye State has long been difficult ground for McCain. Some Iowans admire his candor, but he has put others off with his outspoken opposition to agricultural subsidies -- namely ethanol.
When McCain skipped the 2000 caucuses to focus on New Hampshire, he finished fifth in Iowa, with just 5% of the vote. After barely campaigning in Iowa this year, he wound up fourth.
Despite the current gap in the polls, Iowa is one of the few states where McCain is outspending his opponent.
And his decision to spend one of the few days he has left flying in for a single event in Davenport suggests that the McCain campaign believes it has a real chance to win the state that President Bush won by some 10,000 votes in 2004.
The optimism puzzles some longtime political observers, like David Redlawsk, an associate professor at the University of Iowa and director of the Hawkeye Poll.
"It's really surprising that at this stage of the campaign -- when the most valuable thing a candidate has is his time -- that he'd be putting the time into a state that really does look out of reach, at least by all public indicators," Redlawsk said.
But Mike DuHaime, political director for McCain, insisted that internal polling showed a much closer race between the Arizona senator and Obama.
"It's no doubt a tough state -- it's gone Republican only once since 1984 . . . but it's a state we feel good about," DuHaime said.
He said that Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa -- all states McCain has visited in the last few days -- could move in a block for the Republican come November.
Analysts including J. Ann Selzer, who conducts the Des Moines Register's poll, said they had yet to see evidence for the campaign's claim.
