Voters know they are about to be heard

From a discount store in Virginia to the trendy shopping malls of Nevada and Florida, from a farmer’s market in North Carolina to a public library in Colorado, Americans consulted head and heart Saturday to determine what they alone controlled as the endless presidential campaign comes to an end: the choice.

The stakes were obvious, and not just for Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. There was little talk of the sideshows that have occasionally diverted the campaign. Voters instead were lifting hefty concerns -- war, healthcare and, most of all, an economy that has many feeling like they are spiraling ever closer to the drain.

Calvin Stringfield of Lakeridge, in Virginia’s Prince William County, a battleground county in a battleground state, spoke for many. His technology job is secure, but his daughter was just laid off and is moving back in next weekend. His elderly parents struggle with medical bills.

“There is no relief,” he said from the parking lot of an electronics store. He is choosing Obama.

“Republicans are always more about big business,” he said. “The middle class doesn’t get the same tax breaks. Obama’s plans and policies will help the people who have been overshadowed.”

Nearby was Matt Huggins, a real estate broker whose business is off 75% because of the housing morass, a circumstance that has forced him to take a second job. He has the stresses and strains of a man with two children in college. He is choosing McCain.

“McCain has a better handle on the economy. Bigger government is just not the way to go,” said Huggins, who voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. He praised McCain’s experience in national security and as a war veteran.

“I believe our president should have a heart of servitude -- I see McCain as wanting to serve,” he said. “With Obama, I feel a sense of entitlement.”

Halfway across the country in Aurora, Colo., another swing area, Elizabeth Luzier could not disagree more. As she carried an armful of books into the public library, she yearned for the McCain who ran for president eight years ago.

“He was more moderate; he was reasonable. He much more appealed to me,” said Luzier, a nurse who has already cast a mail-in ballot. “Now it’s like he’ll do anything to get this job. . . . He’s not the same man.”

She voted for Obama. She was drawn to him by his stance on the Iraq war, but found something more.

“He made me feel hopeful,” she said. “He made me feel things could get better for this country. He could work to make things in this country great again -- for us and in the eyes of the rest of the world.”

In Florida, where Mike Grossman had traveled to visit his grandmother, McCain was taking the fall for his party’s perceived failings. Grossman has always voted Republican, but when he recently cast his absentee ballot, he chose Obama.

“I’m tired of it,” the pharmaceutical representative said, sitting in an outlet mall with his father. “After these eight years, they lost me. . . . Everything Republicans believe in they abandoned. All the talk of small government! They failed us as leaders.”

And don’t even get him started about Sarah Palin, the Alaska governor whose ascension onto the ticket has inspired some Republicans and turned off swaths of America. “She’s just a pretty face,” he said. “It’s insulting.”

On that, Tony Kottle can agree, even if his everyday life -- growing and selling plants at a farmer’s market in Raleigh, N.C. -- is distant from Grossman’s life in central New Jersey. He too is choosing Obama.

“We’ve had eight years of bad decisions,” said Kottle, whose small-business peers have garnered a lot of candidate attention.

“McCain’s choice of Palin makes me believe he’ll make more bad choices when it comes time to appoint Cabinet members and ambassadors and other important positions.”

Polling forces Americans into firm groups -- for or against, Republican or Democrat. But for every Jeff Dies, an Ohio man vacationing in Florida who always votes Republican and is choosing McCain, there is another Republican like Sterling Penman of Fort Mojave, Ariz. He drove 100 miles Saturday so his wife could shop at an upscale mall in Henderson, Nev. He has chosen no one. No one since Ronald Reagan has inspired him to vote.

“How are our kids going to pay for all of this -- the war, the bailout?” he said.

But life is lived in the nuance, and that is where many voters continue to reside.

Evelyn Hazen, a sixth-grade teacher from Henderson, would seem to be the prototype of a Palin voter: She was flipping through handouts from her Bible study group. She said she supports McCain -- “reluctantly,” because of concerns about Palin.

“I just worry about him in office. I wonder if he’s going to live, and I worry about Palin becoming president,” she said.

She doesn’t approve of Obama’s healthcare plan or his stance on abortion, but his candidacy has nonetheless heartened her.

“I like the fact that our country has gotten to the point where we can see someone for more than race,” she said.

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cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Times staff writers DeeDee Correll in Colorado, Faye Fiore in Virginia, Ashley Powers in Nevada, Carol J. Williams in Florida and David Zucchino in North Carolina contributed to this report.