Despite Intense Courting, Some Can’t Commit

JoDee Ward, a hospital worker in Garner, Iowa, intended to vote for Rep. Dick Gephardt in Monday’s Democratic caucuses -- until she saw the new ad for Howard Dean highlighting Gephardt’s support for spending billions more to secure and reconstruct Iraq. Now she’s wavering.

Jay Leavesseur, a hotel manager in Iowa City, has liked Sen. John Edwards. But he’s strongly leaning toward Gephardt because he believes the Missouri congressman has the best chance of winning in Iowa against Dean, whom Leavesseur is determined to stop.

Ward and Leavesseur are hardly alone.

Despite months of intensive campaigning by the candidates, saturation levels of television advertising and more than 100,000 handwritten letters sent to state residents by Dean supporters, public and private surveys suggest that about one-third of Iowans likely to attend the caucuses have not firmly settled on a candidate.

Although that is not an unusually large figure by past standards, the competition for their allegiance has become especially intense because polls show Dean, Gephardt, Edwards and Sen. John F. Kerry increasingly bunched together.

And while conversations with dozens of uncommitted voters indicated a steady stream were making their decisions this week, enough said they could remain undecided to leave the outcome uncertain when the caucuses open at 6:30 p.m. Monday.

It is voters like Marie Kamara, a restaurant manager in Buchanan, who have the candidates sweating as the vote approaches.

“I think I will be going [to the caucus] not knowing what I am going to do,” she said. “Maybe I’ll decide at the last minute.”

Many of the uncommitted are voters with a figurative pebble in their shoe. However they try, they can’t quite get entirely comfortable with the candidate they like the best.

Marc Andelman, who works with the developmentally disabled in Tipton, has been leaning toward Dean.

But he’s having second thoughts after seeing an ad from an independent group highlighting the support the former governor got from the National Rifle Assn. during his campaigns in Vermont.

“I want to check if that is really true before I commit to him,” Andelman said.

Kurt Schlawin, a chemical engineer in Muscatine, has been impressed by Edwards.

“I just like his personality; the way that he has run a campaign where he’s not attacking the other candidates,” Schlawin said. “He really has stated his message the best.”

But Schlawin is “going back and forth” because he’s worried that Dean may be a stronger candidate against President Bush.

Other voters remain uncommitted because they find several of the candidates appealing. Shelly Fritz, a receptionist in Davenport, paradoxically likes Edwards because he’s a fresh face and Kerry because he is experienced.

“If they run together, there we go,” she said.

The campaigns divide these uncommitted voters into two camps: those who are truly undecided, and those who lean toward a contender but might change their mind.

Both public and private polls estimate the truly undecided at about 10%, though that number appears to be shrinking daily. The larger group are the leaners -- most of the campaigns think those who could still be dislodged from their choice represent about one-fourth of the electorate.

Combined, that accounts for roughly one-third of the likely voters. And that’s more than enough to tip the race, with the most recent polls showing Dean and Gephardt vying for first place, but with Kerry gaining ground and Edwards only a step behind.

The polls also have shown that as a group, these voters are not much different from those who have firmly made a pick, whether measured in terms of gender, ideology or partisanship. And none of four leading candidates appears to hold a significant advantage with those still up for grabs.

For instance, among those who told The Times Poll last week that they were not firmly committed to their first pick in Iowa, the second choices were clustered closely together. Dean drew 25%, Edwards 20%, Gephardt 19% and Kerry 18%.

Interviews with voters who termed themselves undecided or willing to switch in the Times poll also suggested there was no silver-bullet argument or tactic likely to stampede them toward one candidate or another.

Ward, the hospital worker from Garner, said her support for Gephardt was shaken when she saw Dean’s new ad on the war with Iraq.

“I am probably still going to go with Gephardt,” she said, “but I could very possibly be swayed because I didn’t realize that Gephardt was pushing in Iraq so much, wanting to spend money on that.”

But the same ad pushed Schlawin away from Dean. “I think the effort should still be focused on going after President Bush,” he said.

The interviews indicated that Dean’s aggressive volley may help Edwards’ effort to portray himself as the campaign’s most positive candidate -- an appeal striking a chord among some of the undecided.

“I really like the fact that Edwards is not playing dirty,” said Fritz, the receptionist.

Dean may have been helped by the letters sent to Iowa voters by his supporters from other states, who explained why they were backing him.

According to the Times poll, those notes made a larger impression on many of the uncommitted than the stacks of glossy mailers they received from other campaigns or special interest groups.

But many voters appear to be resolving their ambivalence through calculations beyond the reach of the candidates’ exertions.

Leavesseur, for instance, wants to thwart Dean because he thinks the former governor “doesn’t stand a chance” against Bush.

Todd Burgason, who works for a defense contractor in Cedar Rapids, has picked Gephardt over Edwards after researching their positions on several issues and assigning a score to each candidate based on the results. When they came up even, he picked a tiebreaker -- their views on taxes and the economy -- and chose Gephardt.

The Edwards and Kerry campaigns contend there’s a good chance the remaining undecided will tilt in their directions. They reason that because Dean and Gephardt dominated the early campaigning in Iowa, they are like incumbents in the race. And most voters undecided this close to a vote usually break away from the incumbent.

But Ed Reilly, Gephardt’s pollster, said the demographic similarity between the committed and uncommitted voters made it likely the remaining undecided would divide about the same as those who had already made up their minds.

“I think the big moves [among voters] are done,” he said. “I think we are sort of locked into a bandwidth now that is not likely to change significantly.”

As a result, he said he thinks that organizational strength is more likely to determine the caucuses’ results -- a view seconded by Paul Maslin, Dean’s pollster.

“The ones that are still saying no [to committing] at this stage of the game are not likely to break in any direction in any big way,” Maslin said. “It’s much more likely that [the contest] will be decided by who gets their people to vote.”