FLIPFLOP VOTERS?

BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, October 19, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

John Kerry has been fighting the flip-flop moniker for months. So it will be with some irony if on Nov. 2 he ends up a victim of voters who've told pollsters they support him on domestic issues, but then turn around and elect George W. Bush. Call them flip-flop voters or stealth Bush supporters, but Zell Miller is not the only Democrat hoping the president wins re-election.

We've all met lifelong Democrats who quietly admit they support Mr. Bush this year, and the polls now appear to be opening up in the president's favor. The first sign that many would-be Democratic voters are hoping for a Bush victory probably came in New Jersey. Al Gore won the Garden State by nearly 16 points in 2000, and this year Mr. Kerry leads it by 20 points on when voters are asked who'd do a better job on education, job creation and other domestic issues. But because the issue of national security is on the table, the Democrat's lead in many polls has been in single digits, and several polls have shown a tie race. Republicans are so confident that the state is now in play, Mr. Bush spent yesterday campaigning there.

The president is looking for voters like Carol Del Tufo, a middle-aged teacher and lifelong Democrat. "Look, I'm voting for Bush," she told Washington Post reporter Michael Powell in Holmdel, N.J., last week. "He's very strong, and there's no 'maybe' in his voice." Her neighbor's husband was one of the 700 New Jersey residents murdered in the Sept. 11 attacks. "It was so scary," she said. "I've got kids. I don't want another attack."

The same sentiment can be found in other swing states. Sue Crawley, a social worker who works in Florida placing foster children for adoption, told the Associated Press that she's supporting Mr. Bush because of the threat of another terrorist attack. "I think he's doing the best he can with what he walked into and what he needs to accomplish here. You know sometimes you just can't do it in four years."

These voters aren't alone. A recent AP poll shows that 55% of Americans rank national security as paramount in this election, up from 43% in April. If this election were a referendum on jobs, health care or education, Mr. Kerry would probably be in better shape. So it is not good news for the Democrat that as voters have started paying more attention to this race over the past couple of months, they've increasingly come to see it as a referendum on national security policy.





Nor is it good news for Mr. Kerry that the swing states of Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon and Ohio have turned out to be on the front line in the war on terror. Alleged al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris was living in Columbus, Ohio, and scouting potential targets to attack in the U.S.--including the Brooklyn Bridge--when the FBI caught up to him last year. Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al Masri, who was arrested in London earlier this year, was indicted in the U.S. for allegedly trying to set up terrorist training camps in Oregon in 1999 and 2000, among other things.
The FBI's counterterrorism task force in Minneapolis is proving adept at following up al Qaeda links. The unit there is responsible for nabbing Zacarias Moussaoui a month before Sept. 11, while he was learning to fly in Eagan, Minn. The unit also arrested Mohammed A. Warsame, on charges of conspiring to provide material support to al Qaeda, and Mohamad K. Elzahabi, who allegedly lied to investigators during a terrorism inquiry. Minneapolis is a magnet for Islamic extremism because of its growing Middle Eastern population and because it's only a few hundred miles from the Canadian border.

Florida was briefly home to several of the 9/11 hijackers. It was also the first state to be hit with the anthrax attacks, followed by New York and Washington, D.C. And the letters carrying the deadly powder were likely mailed from New Jersey.

The Garden State seems to come up again and again in terrorists' plans. It is where some of the bombers initially fled after the 1993 World Trade Center attack. And this summer we learned of a possible plot to attack the Prudential Building and other places in the financial district in Newark. More recently a computer disk was found in Iraq containing information on eight school districts in the U.S.--a threat that has taken on added significance after the school massacre in Beslan, Russia. Two of the eight school districts are in New Jersey; the others are in the swing states of Florida, Michigan and Oregon and the solid states of California and Georgia.

Mr. Kerry had hoped to neutralize the president on national security with his Vietnam record and by trotting out a generals who support his candidacy. He also looked to attract veterans and military voters by hammering the president for not looking after the troops, instituting a "backdoor draft" and not providing veterans with more health care. Mr. Kerry hoped that would move national security off the table and leave him free to campaign on domestic issues.
The problem is that this is all turning out to be a house of cards. Military personnel, veterans and a lot of other voters couldn't get past Mr. Kerry's anti-Vietnam activities. The veteran health-care issue never got traction because Mr. Bush increased veterans health spending to nearly $27 billion, up from $20 billion four years ago. Complaints of the "backdoor draft" made Mr. Kerry appear to be disparaging the service of those who've willingly and proudly fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. As for that list of generals Mr. Kerry rattled off in the debates, no one outside the Beltway has heard of them.

On domestic issues the cards are tumbling too. In that same AP poll cited above, only two in 10 respondents said the economy was their top issue; another 13% cited jobs. Notwithstanding Mr. Kerry's often-repeated line that Mr. Bush is the first president to lose jobs in 72 years (he's wisely stopped mentioning Herbert Hoover, whom most voters are too young to remember), lost jobs probably never were going to be a driving issue of this campaign. With a low 5.4% unemployment rate, it seems that the million or so jobs that have vanished over the past four years have disappeared with the people who used to fill them. Perhaps all those older Americans and teenagers enticed into the labor force in the 1990s with dot-com bubble-inflated pay didn't really want to work after all.

Polls can be wrong, of course, and this year there's more reason than usual to doubt pollster's ability to capture the mood of the country. Typically pollsters try to figure who is a "likely voter," and the best indicator of that has been whether that person voted in the last election. But this year both sides are going all out to mobilize new voters. Some polls also adjust for party identification, which means they would miss any underlying shift from one party to the other.
There will likely be a record number of voters this year. Just over 100 million Americans voted in 2000, about half of those eligible. This year some estimate as many as 110 million to 115 million people will cast ballots. Democrats claim they've signed up more voters than Republicans. But that hardly seems to matter if, once alone in the voting booth, the chief concern isn't lost jobs but rather another terrorist attack. If that happens, Mr. Kerry may find that a lot of the voters his campaign volunteers get to the polls will have silently voted for Mr. Bush.