Parties Push to Get Vote All the Way Out in Ohio

Zach Tolbert is just 15, so he doesn’t have a driver’s license and isn’t old enough to vote. His real passions are skiing, his church youth group and his alto saxophone.

But one night last week, he was hunkered down at a desk in a suburban Cincinnati office, dressed in a T-shirt and baggy pants, cold-calling Ohio voters.

“President Bush is committed to defending America in the war on terror, growing the economy and providing affordable and accessible healthcare,” said Zach, reading from an official script and doodling on the printed list of names in front of him. “Can President Bush count on your support?”

Zach is part of the fierce ground war of the 2004 presidential campaign, a grinding fight that already has resulted in a surge of newly registered voters nationwide. With the registration deadline in Ohio and several other states having passed Monday, campaign combatants are quickly transitioning to the next phase: massive efforts by each side to get as many of their voters as possible to the polls or, just as good, to a mailbox.

These bids to maximize turnout could determine whether Bush or Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts wins the White House. And here in the critical swing state of Ohio, Zach Tolbert is among the tens of thousands of people involved in the dueling get-out-the-vote drives, viewed by many experts as the most intensive for any election.

Zach says he supports the president because he sees him “as a better person, a more moral person” than Kerry.

He does have an additional motivation: Zach’s work is earning him credit in advanced-placement U.S. history at Cincinnati’s Walnut Hills High School. The teacher, Scott Grunder, says Zach is one of eight students at the school helping the Bush campaign, while 57 are helping the Kerry campaign.

In campaign argot, Zach and the 27 other volunteers making calls for Bush the other evening were on an “absentee ballot chase.” They contact people who have requested such ballots to make sure they complete and mail them.

In the campaign’s final days, workers on both sides will be calling, cajoling, even offering rides to make sure other voters get to the polls on Nov. 2.

Though Ohio may be especially critical to the Bush campaign -- no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying Ohio -- the effort by Kerry’s backers in the state is no less exhaustive.

With the help of organized labor and advocacy groups that are technically unaffiliated with the Kerry campaign, the Democrats have scoured the Buckeye State, registering new voters and contacting those who are registered but have voted sporadically or not at all in the past.

A spokeswoman for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union said that more than 10% of its 120,000 members in Ohio were involved in the campaign, and that it had registered 11,000 members out of 29,000 who were not on voting rolls.

Experts who analyze registration and voting patterns in Ohio say it appears that the pace of new registrations is higher in traditionally Democratic-voting areas, such as its major urban areas in the state’s northeast, than in historically GOP-leaning suburbs, exurbs and rural areas. (People registering to vote here do not have to indicate a party preference.)

That would seem great news for Kerry, but analysts caution that making sure the newly registered actually vote is a much more arduous proposition than getting them to sign the form that allows them to do so.

“We do know that all indications are the Democrats have done a better job of getting more cards turned in, registering more voters,” said John C. Green, an expert on Ohio politics at the University of Akron. “The Democrats are counting on a big turnout, but many of these people have never participated in the process before.... We know they won’t all show up. The big question is: How many are going to show up?”

The secretary of state’s office in Columbus says it will not be able to verify the precise number of new registrants for several days, or even weeks.

Whatever the final figure, it will certainly exceed 177,000 -- Bush’s margin in carrying Ohio in 2000. Bush received 50% of the vote, to about 46.5% for Democrat Al Gore.

The Bush campaign said it had nearly 70,000 volunteers working in Ohio to help him win its 20 electoral votes this year. The 28 making phone calls in Blue Ash last week ranged from Zach and other high school students to Eileen Stebbins, a real estate and antiques dealer in her 70s. She wore a copper “Bush-Cheney 2004 Wrangler” pin on her red, white and blue print dress, and has been volunteering on Republican campaigns for nearly 60 years.

“President Bush needs your vote to continue to work for a safer world and a more hopeful America,” Stebbins said as she reached someone’s voice mail, a frequent occurrence for the campaign phone-bankers.

In a nearby cubicle, Kathryn Cascella, a healthcare executive and mother of three, was having better luck: a real person on the other end of the line.

“President Bush can count on your support?” said Cascella. “All four of you? Great!” She hung up.

“Yes!” she said, pumping her fist. “Four for four!”

Supporters of the Kerry-Edwards campaign, paid and unpaid, are making similar calls these days, with many helping out by phoning voters in Ohio and other hotly contested states from their homes in states considered less competitive.

A variety of polls conducted last month showed Bush with a consistently solid lead in Ohio. But Kerry has clearly closed the gap in recent days, especially following the first candidates’ debate Sept. 30 in Miami.

The Kerry campaign remains hopeful that Ohio’s economic woes make it fertile ground for him.

The state’s steady loss of jobs -- about 250,000 in the Bush term, many in highly visible manufacturing industries such as steel and rubber -- remains a major issue here.

But the Bush campaign can count on general support among Ohioans because of his leadership in the Iraq war, as well as the state’s culturally conservative tendencies. The president also could benefit from strong support for a Nov. 2 measure Bush endorses that would ban same-sex marriage.

Television and radio advertisements also are being used to galvanize turnout.

Carrie Johnson, 28, a nurse at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, said she was driving to work and heard a GOP ad talking about the voter registration deadline.

Johnson was already registered, but the ad reminded her that she would be out of town Nov. 2. So she swung by the Hamilton County Board of Elections the other afternoon and voted absentee for Bush.

“Even though I’m in healthcare -- and believe me, I know it needs reform -- I don’t think Kerry’s plan will work,” she said. “I think it will bankrupt our world.”

Inside the building, John M. Williams, the county’s director of elections, said his office was working full-throttle to process all the new registration forms, as well as a large volume of absentee ballot requests.

“The level of interest in this race is incredible,” he said. “A lot of people are coming in and talking about how important it is to them to vote, to have their say.

“They say, ‘Well, these issues are more critical than they’ve ever been before,’ ” continued Williams. “I can’t judge that; I’m only the administrator. But I can tell you, every day, I hear all this talk about how this might be the most important race of our time.”