WASHINGTON – Polls suggested yesterday that Senator Kerry may have clawed a slight edge over President Bush in key battleground states that will determine the outcome of the White House race.

While the incumbent’s campaign is holding up across the country in several national polls and is even securing apparent momentum in some, including a Fox News survey yesterday that gave the president a lead of five percentage points, Mr. Kerry is scratching out a slight advantage in crucial states in the Midwest and Northeast and is tied with the president in Florida.

In other developments yesterday:

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  The two candidates took their campaigns to the upper Midwest, speaking within 80 miles of each other. The day before, both campaigned in Florida.



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  The Democratic nominee’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, apologized to the first lady, Laura Bush, for a remark she’d made in a newspaper interview.



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  Mr. Kerry invoked an Israeli study to bolster his criticism of the war in Iraq.

Kerry campaign advisers point to statewide polls to argue that battleground states are tilting to the Massachusetts senator. “We think we are in enough states to win a clear and convincing victory in the Electoral College,” one Democrat strategist, Tad Devine, said.

According to averages of polls in battleground states compiled by the Web site RealClearPolitics.com, Mr. Kerry now enjoys marginal advantages in Ohio, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and he is leading in Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Of other battleground states, Mr. Bush is thought to be leading in Missouri, Nevada, Colorado, and West Virginia.

Mr. Kerry’s statistical edge is often tiny. In Ohio polling, which has 20 electoral votes, he leads by an average of 0.4%, and in Wisconsin, worth 10 electoral votes, he has eked out a lead of 0.7%.

Officials of the Bush campaign say the margins are insignificant and maintain the president is on an upswing, making inroads among key Democratic voting blocs, such as women and low-in come voters.

They argue that all the battleground states of the Midwest and Northeast are up for grabs, including Pennsylvania, with 21 electoral votes, which was won byVice President Gore in 2000 and is the third biggest battleground prize, after Florida and Ohio.

The chief strategist of the Bush campaign, Matthew Dowd, has argued in a state-of-the-race note that the president is building momentum, saying, “the Kerry campaign pulled its advertising out of West Virginia on Friday, making it the latest in a string of their retreats from former ‘battleground’ states.”

“In fact,” Mr. Dowd went on, “the Kerry campaign and its allies have now conceded victory to the President by pulling out of Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, after they combined to spend $36 million on ads in those states.”

Democrats are leading the GOP in new voter registrations in many of the remaining battleground states, however, although Kerry advisers concede that it remains uncertain how many new voters will actually turn up to cast their ballots.

Political analysts question the significance of the registration drives, too. According to a former Clinton political strategist, Dick Morris, the Democrats may be banking too heavily on young new voters, as the onetime Democratic front-runner, Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, did in his primary campaign.

“We heard this type of talk with Howard Dean earlier this year and when it came time to deliver, it was just that, a lot of talk,” Mr. Morris said.

Both campaigns said turnout will prove crucial in a White House race that remains tight, despite the slim advantage Mr. Kerry seems to be carving out in the Midwest.

“This is going to come down to a couple of states, probably Ohio and Iowa,” a top GOP official told The New York Sun. “If I had to bet on one state making the difference, it would be Ohio.”

Mr. Dowd and other Bush aides contend that an air of inevitability is building for the president, citing polls that show a majority of respondents, including pro-Kerry ones, predicting that Mr. Bush will beat the Democrat. That, they said, could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“If the vast majority of your supporters believe you’re going to win, you’re going to be more motivated to turn out, and get other people to turn out,” Mr. Dowd said. “Conversely, if a third of Kerry supporters don’t think their candidate’s going to win, that means they would be much less likely to turn out or help in the final days.”

Yesterday, the presidential tickets kept their focus on the Midwest in their bids to sway undecided voters, with Mr. Kerry launching broadsides against the president on campaign stops in Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and with Mr. Bush returning rapid fire while stumping in the Hawkeye State, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Speaking in Waterloo, Iowa, Mr. Kerry insisted that Mr. Bush’s conduct in Iraq is weakening the United States by isolating it. “I will lead and I believe others will follow,” he said. “The president says he’s a leader. Well, Mr. President, look behind you. There’s hardly anyone there. It’s not leadership if we haven’t built the strongest alliance possible and if America is going almost alone.”

The Democrat nominee altered the wording of his remarks about the need for new leadership from his prepared speech as given to reporters before delivery. According to the prepared text, Mr. Kerry was going to say after telling Mr. Bush to look behind him, “there’s no one there.” The change presumably was made to ensure that the president wouldn’t rebut with a list of allies in the “coalition of the willing.”

Mr. Kerry also pounded home his charge that the president’s Iraq war has distracted from the war on terrorism.

“America is fighting and must win two wars. The war in Iraq, and the war on terror,” he said. “Iraq was a profound diversion from that war and the battle against our greatest enemy, Osama bin Laden, and the Al Qaeda network. But now that we’re fighting two wars, we must and we will prevail in both.”

The Democratic nominee cited a report by Israel’s Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies, a leading think tank, that calls Iraq “a major distraction from the global war on terrorism” and says: “Iraq has now become a convenient arena for jihad, which has helped Al Qaeda to recover. … The U.S. presence in Iraq now demands more and more assets that might have otherwise been deployed … against the global terrorist threat.”

Mr. Kerry said: “The Israelis know more about terrorism than anyone else because they have suffered more from it than anyone else – which is one reason we must always stand by their side.”

A Kerry spokesman, Mike McCurry, said the Democratic nominee will continue to criticize Mr. Bush on Iraq to sway undecided voters who harbor doubts about the president’s decision to send troops to oust Saddam Hussein.

“They are more and more convinced that President Bush does not deserve to be re-elected, and they are trying to get to the point where they can see and embrace John Kerry as the next president,” Mr. McCurry, who was State Department spokesman and later press secretary for President Clinton, said.

In Iowa’s Mason City, just an hour’s drive from where Mr. Kerry was speaking, Mr. Bush retorted that his opponent’s views on national security are misguided. The president was due to focus on domestic issues but switched to respond to the Kerry jabs.

“The next commander in chief must lead us to victory in this war and you cannot win a war when you don’t believe you’re fighting one,” Mr. Bush told hundreds of enthusiastic supporters. The president dismissed Mr. Kerry’s contention that the toppling of the Iraqi dictator was a diversion from the war on terror, saying it was a “central commitment in that struggle.”

“My opponent misunderstands our battle against insurgents and terrorists in Iraq when calling Iraq ‘a diversion from the war on terror,'” the president said. Mr. Bush cited the case of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed to be responsible for the beheadings of Americans in Iraq, to show “how wrong” Mr. Kerry’s thinking is.

“If Zarqawi and his associates were not busy fighting American forces, does Senator Kerry think he would be leading a productive and useful life?” asked Mr. Bush. “Of course not. And that is why Iraq is no diversion.”

Later, in Rochester, Minn., the president returned to the theme of Zarqawi, saying the terrorist, who has sworn allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, “was plotting and planning to attack us.”

As the presidential candidates exchanged attacks, Mrs. Heinz Kerry apologized for a remark she made in an interview with USA Today. In it, she said she didn’t know if Mrs. Bush had ever done “a real job.” Later, the Democratic nominee’s wife said she had forgotten that Mrs. Bush worked for a decade as a schoolteacher and librarian.

All three Midwestern states the president campaigned in yesterday went narrowly against him four years ago.

While the two campaign organizations publicly express confidence about their chances of pulling off a clear victory, both are developing detailed legal, political, and public relations blueprints for coping with a judicial showdown over a disputed election result.

Kerry aides said yesterday that in the event of a close election they will avoid what they see as Mr. Gore’s mistake of offering a premature concession, only to withdraw it. They will declare victory in the event there are doubts about the result.

“Right now, we have 10,000 lawyers out in the battleground states on Election Day, and that number is growing by the day,” a Democratic National Committee aide, Michael Whouley, told the Associated Press. Mr. Whouley, who was the Democrat aide who alerted Mr. Gore on election night four years ago to the closeness of the Florida count, is to head a team at National Committee headquarters in Washington to coordinate a war room monitoring the vote in battleground states.