Candidates Target Undecided Iowans as Polls Show 3-Way Tie

Democratic presidential candidates scattered across Iowa on Thursday in fevered attempts to energize supporters and make sure they participate in Monday’s caucuses -- an intensified pace driven, in part, by polls showing a three-way tie for first place.

The surveys found Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts clustered at the top, and Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina close behind.

Iowa Atty. Gen. Tom Miller, a Kerry supporter, termed the contest “the closest, most undecided race I’ve ever seen in caucus history.”

Iowa’s complicated caucus system has often made such surveys notoriously unreliable. Still the polls underscored the importance of reaching out to undecided voters, stirring up the enthusiasm of wavering supporters and honing organizational muscle. Such efforts could make the difference between victory and a fourth-place finish.

For all the differences candidates are trying to emphasize, each campaign has one common goal: getting supporters to turn up at the caucuses -- held in living rooms, fire stations and other sites throughout the state.

“The polls don’t really matter in the last few days. It’s all organization,” Dean said at a news conference in Carroll. “It is essentially a four-way tie,” he said later on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

Dean in the last year moved from unknown to frontrunner, but in the last week has seen his lead nearly evaporate here and in New Hampshire. Thursday, he campaigned with a new supporter, Carol Moseley Braun, the former senator from Illinois who the night before abandoned a presidential bid that that had barely made a dent in the polls.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), another prominent Dean backer, also stumped with him. And Thursday night, Dean was endorsed by former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.

Dennis Goldford, head of the political science department at Drake University in Des Moines, said a key reason for the race’s tightness is that many Democrats want to find the candidate with the best chance of defeating President Bush.

“Everybody wants somebody to beat Bush, but they’re still not confident they’ve found that person,” Goldford said.

Gephardt, seeking to fire up his support among industrial union workers, arrived at a dinner-time rally in Marshalltown in a caravan of seven 18-wheelers.

The Missouri congressman climbed down from the cab of the final truck with Teamsters President James P. Hoffa. They were surrounded by chanting supporters: Teamsters, laborers, boilermakers, steelworkers -- many of whom are knocking on doors and working phones on Gephardt’s behalf.

When the candidate criticized the president’s proposal to spend billions of dollars for human exploration of Mars, the crowd chanted: “Send Bush to Mars.”

Gephardt said: “Maybe we are for this Mars program. It might be worth it -- if we could get rid of George Bush.”

Before he spoke, a succession of union presidents praised him as the sole candidate who workers could depend on to defend their interests.

On the first full day of a five-day bus tour, Dean abandoned his usual gray business suit for an evergreen-colored sweater.

And as his nine-vehicle motorcade wove through the countryside beyond Des Moines, Dean’s rhetoric briefly took on a moderated tone.

In Fort Dodge, he dropped his angry denunciation of his opponents as Washington insiders. For months, he had used that message to draw a contrast between himself, a doctor turned politician who had spent 11 years as Vermont governor, and his rivals, whose careers have been spent largely in Washington.

Harkin said he had urged Dean, whom he endorsed last week, to adopt a sunnier message in the final days before the caucuses.

Dean did so, but only briefly.

By midday he had returned to denouncing his opponents. The presidential race, he said, is “about whether the Democratic Party is going to nominate one of the old boys’ club that’s been there forever or whether they’re going to change America.”

With two of the major candidates, Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, not competing in Iowa, the race is essentially a four-way contest.

For months, the campaign has been largely a battle between Dean and Gephardt. But in the closing weeks, Kerry and Edwards have drawn excited audiences and found strength that had eluded them throughout 2003.

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio and the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York have had little visibility in Iowa.

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Both public polling and private surveys by the campaigns showed the contest has become too close to call.

In a conference call with reporters, Gephardt pollster Ed Reilly said the campaign’s polling found Dean slightly down, Kerry and Edwards up, and Gephardt holding steady.

“There are four people voters are looking at,” Reilly said.

Reilly estimated that 15% of the anticipated 100,000 to 125,000 caucus-goers remained undecided. But he said another 15% to 20% are not firmly tied to their first-choice candidate. Thus, he said, candidates could pick up support even as the caucuses are underway.

New rounds of advertising by some of the candidates sought to raise doubts about their rivals -- questioning their dedication to core Democratic positions and their potential strength against Bush in the general election.

Gephardt aired a commercial bluntly attacking Dean on Social Security and Medicare as he sought to appeal to seniors. It was his first ad here to attack Dean on these key domestic issues.

“How much do you really know about Howard Dean?” the narrator asks.

Dean has charged Gephardt with misrepresenting his positions on the programs.

Except for a noon rally in a downtown Des Moines hotel by Edwards, the candidates were on a highway tour of Iowa. They traveled two-lane state roads in bus and van caravans and fanned out so widely that few Iowans had to travel more than 50 miles to glimpse a campaign in motion.

And by early afternoon, Edwards, too, was on his way in a bus to the public library in Oskaloosa, a small city in the southeast of the state.

In his Des Moines speech, Edwards presented himself as a defender of the common man and touted what he called “the politics of hope.”

Washington lobbyists drew his sharpest verbal arrows

“This government, your democracy, does not belong to that crowd of insiders in Washington,” Edwards said. “In this campaign, this movement, you and I will restore the power in this democracy to you.... That’s what’s at stake in this election.”

Over the last two weeks, he has become increasingly energized in his speeches, stirred by crowds that he says have been twice the size his advance team expected.

“It’s an amazing thing to watch,” Edwards said Thursday. “It’s an incredible energy.”

Presenting a similarly sunny outlook, Kerry said to reporters before leaving by helicopter for Adel, near Sioux City: “I feel momentum. I feel energy in the campaign out there. The crowds have been incredible.”

Kerry’s press secretary, David Wade, said the campaign was targeting undecided voters.

The campaign said it would air a new advertisement today featuring Christie Vilsack, the wife of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. She traveled with him throughout the day.

“He has a lifetime record of taking on special interests,” she says of Kerry in the television and radio ad.

Kerry began the day flipping pancakes in Pottawattamie County, and later spoke at the Council Bluffs community hall.

“George Bush has announced that he intends to make national security the key issue of this campaign: preemption, war on terror,” Kerry said. “It’s gonna be another one of these ‘culture of fear’ elections.

“We need a nominee who can stand up to him, a nominee whose credentials and credibility on national security is capable of showing that this president doesn’t have the experience to be commander in chief.”

Earlier, in Mason City, Gephardt shook hands at Suzie Q Cafe with owner Cindy Pike. She exclaimed: “I might have shook the hand of a president! Let me shake your hand again!”

But she confided after the candidate had left that she was still torn between Gephardt and Edwards.

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Times staff writers Mark Z. Barabak, Ronald Brownstein, Matea Gold, Maria L. La Ganga and Scott Martelle contributed to this report.