Both Candidates Focus on Ohio

Both Barack Obama and John McCain began their final week of campaigning in Ohio on Monday, where polls have shown the two candidates in a too-close-to-call footrace for weeks. It is likely to remain that close until November 4.

Obama presented what his campaign dramatically called its closing arguments in Canton in closely fought Stark county south of Akron, while McCain swung through the state’s more reliably Republican southern flank with stops in Lancaster and Zanesville. "It's been a long time since whoever was going to be President didn't win the state of Ohio," McCain said last week in Cincinnati. "I'm not going to break that tradition. We're going to win the state of Ohio." A TIME/CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll last week showed the two men are four points apart, 50-46, in a survey with a margin of error of 3%. A Ohio Newspaper poll over the weekend reported that Obama led McCain by three points.

Ohio, in general, is not naturally fertile ground for Obama. Hillary Clinton defeated him soundly in the primary last march, when he won only 8 of the state’s 88 counties, almost all of them urban. Ohio voted twice for George W. Bush, and twice for Bill Clinton, but over the course of the last 20 years, it has trended steadily Republican, private GOP surveys show. The Democrats managed to break that trend in 2006, winning the governor’s office and a Senate seat amid opposition to the war in Iraq and an overwhelming belief that the country was on the wrong track. But the state doesn’t seem to want to settle this year: according to Real Clear Politics average of all statewide polls, the lead in Ohio has changed hands four times since March. Obama has yet to achieve the double digit margins in Ohio that he enjoys in Michigan, Pennsylvania and, to a lesser extent, Virginia. And he probably never will.

According to the latest TIME/CNN/Opinion Research survey in the state, doubts about Obama seem to linger among segments of the state’s white population. Though he trails Obama overall in Ohio, John McCain is beating Obama among white voters by five points, 50% to 45%. Most of this gap is due to white men: McCain leads Obama by one point among white women but is preferred over Obama among white men by a margin of 52% to 42%. McCain also leads Obama among independent voters in the state by a margin of 48% to 44%. TIME/CNN/Opinion Research will be releasing new data on Ohio Wednesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, in another sign of how closely contested Ohio will remain, the state’s Republican party has repeatedly taken the Democratic Secretary of State to court to force her to make questionable voter registration lists automatically available to county boards of elections for verification. Several hundred thousand names on Ohio voter roles are thought to be old or incorrect and the state’s Republicans want those names checked and, if necessary, purged, before the polls open. That fight has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected the party's action on the grounds that it did not have legal standing; additional battles are now underway, including a request by the Bush Administration to have the Justice Department investigate the matter before Election Day.

All this helps explain why neither side yet sounds confident of victory — and no doubt why both candidates launched their final week of campaigning in the state. An Obama campaign aide said over the weekend that Ohio remains extremely challenging for the Democratic nominee; a longtime Republican in the state sounds just as pessimistic about McCain’s chances and reports that the lead McCain enjoyed in swing counties in mid-September had all but disappeared by mid-October.

Which means that about the only thing that is certain is that both McCain and Obama will be back before the week is out.

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