Last hour, camps set for battle of streets

President Bush and challenger John Kerry unleashed the biggest and most aggressive voter-mobilisation drives in the history of presidential ...

President Bush and challenger John Kerry unleashed the biggest and most aggressive voter-mobilisation drives in the history of presidential politics Sunday, tapping hundreds of thousands of volunteers and paid organisers in a final effort to tip the balance in a handful of states where the election will be decided Tuesday.

Mixing sophisticated techniques to identify potential supporters with old-fashioned shoe leather and face-to-face contact to woo loyal and sporadic voters, the two campaigns will contact millions of Americans—many of them more than once—in the final hours of the campaign and then track them on Election Day to ensure they have gone to the polls.

The unprecedented efforts underscore the conviction of officials in both campaigns that with the race so close in so many states, the key to victory depends more than in any recent campaign on their ability to win the battle of the streets, and in Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Mexico, opposing armies fanned out under blazing sun or cold, drizzly skies to reach as many voters as possible.

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No potential voter is likely to escape the campaigns’ nets in the final days. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, Mayor Jim Schmitt tried to nap Saturday afternoon, only to be interrupted by a knock on his door from a Kerry canvasser. Just as he fell asleep again, there was another canvasser at his door, this time from the Bush campaign.

In the Minneapolis suburb of Plymouth on Saturday, two GOP voters reported the Bush campaign had already contacted them three times. In Ohio, Democrats said they had 27,000 people working phone banks and on Saturday night made 399,446 calls. A Bush campaign official said they were contacting 400,000 people a day in Ohio. In Pennsylvania, the Bush campaign planned to contact 2 million voters between Friday and Election Day.

The weekend blitz represented the culmination of many months of preparation by the campaigns, which along with outside allies will spend $300 million and perhaps much more on targeting and turning out their voters. Longtime organisers say they have never seen so much money available. Bush’s budget for voter mobilisation is about $125 million, at least triple that of four years ago, a knowledgeable official said. Kerry’s field operation, run out of the Democratic National Committee, will spend nearly $60 million, more than doubling what the Democrats spent in 2000.

Supplementing the campaigns and party operations are outside groups, potentially most important being America Coming Together, a pro-Kerry organisation funded with ‘‘soft money’’, that is likely to spend $100 million to $125 million. Organised labor also will spend tens of millions to reach union members. Bush can count on help from conservative and business organisations, although none comes close to the—Edsall reported from Iowa. —LAT-WP