Campaign '04: Fighting For Every Last Vote

IN LANCASTER, OHIO, A FAST-GROWING SUBURB OF COLUMBUS WHERE cornfields are giving way to subdivisions, the Bush re-election headquarters at 120 East Main Street ran out of yard signs after giving out 3,500 of them and is scrambling to get more. Each evening, volunteers pour into a nearby building to make more than 1,000 telephone calls--their share of the more than 30,000 that George W. Bush's campaign says its ground troops make in Ohio every night. When the sun comes up, the volunteers are out knocking on doors across Fairfield County. "I don't think it's close," says Jim Mergler, 61, of the race in the county. Mergler is a retired teacher who voted for Al Gore in 2000 but is spending six hours a day this year going house to house for the Bush team, because, he says, they were the ones who asked him. "The Democratic Party in this county doesn't exist."

Apparently, Mergler hasn't noticed 1201/2 East Main Street--up a mere flight of stairs from Bush headquarters. The John Kerry--John Edwards posters in the windows of James M. Linehan's law offices give a hint of what is going on there each night when a smaller but equally determined band of Democratic volunteers takes over the premises for its own phone-bank operation. Linehan thought he knew just about every Democratic activist in the county, so he was startled when dozens of strangers showed up at an organizing meeting in his office last month. It turned out they had received e-mail invitations from the national campaign's field operation and had come from all over the county to help. Although Linehan admits that the Democrats are still outgunned by the Republicans in a county that Bush won handily in 2000, he says he believes the Kerry insurgents can narrow the gap to the point where Kerry's advantage in other parts of the state will enable him to carry Ohio. "I'm telling you we're going to win this state," Linehan says. "We have received more requests for signs than ever before. We've had more volunteers. The ranks of the Democratic Party have swelled unlike any time I've seen."

That is what campaigning comes down to with three weeks left until voting day in a high-stakes election that a record number of Americans say they are following intensely, with polls showing the race too close to call. The battleground, once thought to comprise 20 states, is shrinking: Democrats and their allies, for example, are quietly redeploying some of their forces out of Michigan, which they are beginning to think they have won, and Arizona, which is starting to look like a lost cause for them. The number of undecided voters is minuscule--only 3% in a TIME poll last week--though the figure masks the volatility of the race. One in 10 Kerry supporters said they had supported Bush in the past few months; 5% of Bush supporters said they had supported Kerry at some point recently.