Campaign '04: Fighting For Every Last Vote

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The Democrats, who have been at this longer, say these novice volunteers, however eager, aren't going to produce what the G.O.P. hopes they will--especially when they are trying to fit politics somewhere between working a job, coaching soccer and attending church. "That whole operation is smoke and mirrors," says Greg Haas, the veteran political consultant who ran Bill Clinton's Ohio operation in 1992. "It might be good at generating big rallies, but it isn't anything like what's happening on the other side."

IN MOST STATES, THE FIRST PHASE OF THE ground war had ended by last week, when the voter-registration deadline passed. There was ample evidence of the effectiveness of both sides' field operations, as registrars across the country reported being swamped by the incoming applications, their staffs working nights and weekends just to process the paperwork. Mary Jo Long, director of the Licking County Board of Elections outside Columbus, is two weeks behind--despite the fact that her staff has been working 10 hours a day for the past two weeks, and last week added a seventh day to the work week. In the swing district of Berks County, Pa., two separate partisan groups showed up within five minutes of each other to drop off a total of 4,000 new registrations at the office of the director of elections. Michigan secretary of state Terry Lynn Land predicts that 96% of the state's eligible voters will be registered to vote in this election. In Florida, where Bush pulled out his victory in 2000 with a hotly disputed 537-vote margin over Al Gore, 1 million people have registered to vote since then. "People are coming out of the woodwork to register," says Ion Sancho, the supervisor of elections in North Florida's Democratic-leaning Leon County. "These are new people, people who have never been to the polls. I expect a record turnout." Most, he says, are not registering as members of either party, which suggests to him that "they are registering to vote in the presidential race, and the presidential race only."

Reports from the most closely contested areas suggest that the Democrats have made the greatest gains in registration, primarily by working urban and minority neighborhoods. Republicans say they aren't fazed, that the Democrats' hired guns are turning in incomplete, fraudulent and duplicate registrations that they plan to make sure are thrown out before the balloting starts.

But there are early indications too that Democrats are showing their traditional turnout edge in the absentee and early voting that is already going on. Early voting got under way Sept. 23 in Iowa, and Democrats say the early tallies in the six biggest counties suggest that ballots of registered Democrats are coming in more than twice as fast as ballots of registered Republicans.