PRESIDENT BUSH has pulled into a formidable 13-point lead, according to one poll, as his campaign adopted yesterday an aggressive new strategy to keep John Kerry on the back foot.
Two other polls gave optimists and pessimists in both camps something to chew on. But the Bush camp is adopting the posture of a clear favourite, moving money and manpower into states Mr Kerry has to defend.
The Gallup survey had Mr Bush on 55 per cent to the Massachusetts senator’s 42 per cent, the largest lead any poll has given the President since his “bounce” from the Republican convention at the beginning of the month.
But two other polls showed Mr Kerry narrowing the divide. The respected Pew Research Centre gave Mr Bush a statistically insignificant 47 per cent to 46 per cent lead among likely voters. A Harris poll gave Mr Kerry an equally insignificant edge, 48 per cent to 47 per cent. However, both privately give Mr Bush a lead of between four and five points.
After eight months in which Mr Bush and Mr Kerry were inseparable in the polls, the recent findings point to more swings in the coming weeks.
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“After so long when the polls were deadlocked no matter what happened, now we have a situation where voter opinion is unsettled,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Centre. “There’s a lot of uncertainty and you’re going to have more variation in the polls than we’ve had in the past.”
Either way, the Bush campaign has begun to behave like a campaign in charge of the race, focusing its resources assertively on states the President lost last time and that Mr Kerry is trying to hang on to.
In a sign of confidence, the Bush camp is signalling it is ready to cut its manpower and spending in states such as Arizona, Arkansas, and possibly even bellwether Missouri, believing them to be all but wrapped up.
Instead Mr Bush, his wife, Laura, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, are fanning out into states that Al Gore won in 2000, forcing the Kerry camp to protect its rear. Republicans have not won Minnesota in a presidential election since 1972, the longest unbroken run of Democratic victories anywhere. In 1984 it was the only one of the 50 states to vote for Walter Mondale, a local son, rather than Ronald Reagan.
Yet Mr Bush spent a whole day there on Thursday and Republicans are ready to pile in advertising money, forcing Mr Kerry to do likewise when he would prefer to be advertising in states won by Mr Bush last time which he needs to take him to the White House.
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Mrs Bush, campaigning hard on her own, surprised Democrats by going to New Jersey on Thursday, a state in which Mr Kerry recently had a double-digit lead but where polls suggest the race has tightened sharply.
The Bush campaign is preparing for a big push in Wisconsin which Mr Kerry is defending, and has notably avoided classic battleground states such as Ohio and Missouri for the past two weeks.
Mr Bush’s majority in the 538-vote electoral college was just four in 2000. But because states have been allocated different numbers of votes this year to reflect the shifting US population as it moves south and west, a re-run of the 2000 election with this year’s electoral college would give Mr Bush an 18-point victory.
Mr Bush is employing a unique strategy as he campaigns for re-election. Most presidents looking for a second term use the grandeur of the presidential office to make their case. They hope to belittle their opponent by staging Bill signings and other events in the White House and its environs, a so-called “Rose Garden strategy”.
Mr Bush is doing the opposite, haring around the country as if he were the challenger. This Wednesday was the first day since August 2 that Mr Bush spent the whole day in Washington.
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The chief reason is the fear among Republican strategists that Mr Bush would lose an election if it was regarded as a referendum on his first term. Thus, the strenuous efforts by Republican supporters to destroy Mr Kerry’s character in the hope they can turn the election into a referendum on the challenger.
The Kerry campaign unveiled a new TV advert yesterday devoted to Mr Cheney and Halliburton, and the company he ran until 2000, which has picked up reconstruction contracts worth billions of dollars in postwar Iraq.