Election Seen as Dead Heat By New Polls
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WASHINGTON – President Bush and Senator Kerry headed toward Wednesday’s final presidential debate locked in a dead heat, according to new polls taken after their second face-to-face meeting last week.
With three weeks to go before Election Day, the tightened race puts new importance on the last nationally televised meeting between the two, which is scheduled to emphasize domestic issues amid a campaign that has been dominated by the Iraq war.
Mr. Kerry is preparing to press his criticism of the administration’s economic and health-care policies, which he claims have hurt the middle class. The final jobs report before the election, released last Friday, showed fewer than expected jobs were created last month.
Mr. Bush, meanwhile, is likely to press his opponent on issues such as limits on medical-liability lawsuits, which Mr. Kerry said Friday he supports but has voted against in the Senate. The president is also likely to repeat his claim that Mr. Kerry cannot pay for all his domestic proposals without raising taxes on the middle class.
The Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Edwards, said the team would respond to its trailing position in the ABC poll by making the case that the president has abandoned the middle class.
“We have to, number one, focus on making sure the American people know what’s happened over the last four years – millions of people losing their health care, millions of people going into poverty, family incomes going down – that this is the first president in over 70 years to fail to create jobs,” the North Carolina senator said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
Mr. Bush prepared to campaign in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, where he planned to make the case that his policies are helping the economy grow and making the country safer, as well as to underscore inconsistencies in Mr. Kerry’s statements.
“The debates have offered Americans a chance to see President Bush’s firm resolve and clear vision for the country, which differs dramatically with John Kerry’s muddled explanations and changing positions,” a campaign spokesman, Kevin Madden, said.
The jostling comes as Mr. Kerry appears to have largely closed the gap that opened after the Republican National Convention last month.
Mr. Kerry held on to a slim 1-point lead over Mr. Bush after Friday’s second debate between the White House rivals, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released yesterday. He led the president by 46% to 45%, a result well within the poll’s margin of error. Mr. Bush, however, led Mr. Kerry by 4 percentage points in an ABC News poll, which showed the president enjoying the support of 50% of likely voters in the sample, to 46% for Mr. Kerry.
“This is so much like 2000 it’s scary,” one of the pollsters, John Zogby, was quoted by Reuters as saying. “There is a lot of campaigning to go. Remember that in 2000, the lead changed several times in October.”
The Reuters/Zogby poll of 1,216 likely voters was taken Thursday through Saturday. The final day of polling came after the debate but showed little change in the race, the Reuters news agency reported. The ABC nationwide telephone survey was conducted October 6-9 among 1,589 adults identified as likely to vote November 2.Both polls’ results were within their margins of error.
Before traveling to Arizona last night to begin preparations for the de bate in Tempe, Mr. Kerry campaigned yesterday in Florida, where he reminded African-American voters of the closely divided 2000 election. At tending two church services with African-Americans, first with Haitian Catholics and then with black Baptists, Mr. Kerry cast the disputed 2000 recount in civil-rights terms, the Associated Press reported.
“We have an unfinished march in this nation,” Kerry said at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church.
“Never again will a million African-Americans be denied the right to exercise their vote in the United States of America,” he said, promising to respond aggressively to any allegations of disenfranchisement.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson and the Reverend Al Sharpton joined Mr. Kerry to help mobilize the African American voters.
“November 2, the power is in your hands, hands that once picked cotton,” the AP quoted Rev. Jackson as saying.
“Everything we have fought for, marched for, gone to jail for – some died for – could be reversed if the wrong people are put on the Supreme Court,” Rev. Sharpton said.
Mr. Edwards made the rounds of Sunday talk shows, attempting to rebut Mr. Bush’s accusations in Friday’s debate that the Democratic promises will mean expensive and interventionist government programs.
But even as the structure of the debates prompted a shift to domestic maters, both campaigns continued to battle on foreign policy in public appearances and television ads over the weekend.
Mr. Edwards criticized Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who said again yesterday that the president was “absolutely” right to invade Iraq despite the absence of weapons of mass destruction.
“Absolutely, absolutely, because Saddam Hussein, for 12 years, was a major and growing threat to the international community,” Ms. Rice said on “Fox News Sunday.” “It was time to take care of him, and this president, post-September 11th, was not going to let threats continue to gather.”
On the same program, Mr. Edwards later responded: “There are lots of threats waiting to happen all over the world. That doesn’t mean that justifies invading a country.”
Asked to explain how he would have dealt with the threat, the senator said, “We have to monitor constantly what’s happening in those countries and confront those threats and confront them aggressively.”
He was also asked to explain Mr. Kerry’s statement in Friday’s debate that he would “get tough” with Iran over its suspected ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.
Mr. Edwards said a Kerry administration would “move forward with the international community to making sure they stop their nuclear program,” but would not rule out launching a pre-emptive strike on Iran.
Mr. Edwards said Saturday’s elections in Afghanistan were “a good thing” but “far from” a vindication of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
“They’re producing 75% of the world’s opium. On top of that, there are big chunks of the country still in the control of warlords and drug lords, and there are still some serious security issues in the country,” Mr. Edwards said on “This Week.”
Meanwhile, the Bush-Cheney campaign released a new advertisement, to run on cable television, accusing Mr. Kerry of thinking of terrorism as a law enforcement matter more than a military one.
“How can Kerry protect us when he doesn’t understand the threat?” the ad asks.
Mr. Bush and Vice President Cheney did not campaign yesterday.