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Harry Hewitt of suburban Cleveland is a VIP of the 2008 election.
Hewitt, 57, works for Midas International in Rocky River, Ohio. A married Roman Catholic with three grown children, he's a registered Democrat who voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ronald Reagan twice, and each George Bush once. In 2004 he chose John Kerry. This year-and this is what makes him so interesting to the two campaigns-he hasn't decided.
"We have two very good candidates," Hewitt says. He supports the war in Iraq and values John McCain's years in the Senate and the military, but there's something about the new guy that intrigues him. "Obama doesn't have as much experience," he says, "but what makes me lean toward him is that I think he would project a different image to the world. It's time for us to move in a different direction."
Citizens like Harry Hewitt embody the holy grail of national campaigns. They are swing voters. They don't just cast their ballots based on whether a D or an R follows the candidate's name; they vote based on how the campaign unfolds and on the issues that matter most to them.
The most important swing voters are those who live in swing states, as Hewitt does. Think of those maps newspapers publish during presidential election years with color-coded states showing reliably red (Republican) and dependably blue (Democratic) states. The swing states are often purple, meaning they are up for grabs. Hewitt's Ohio is classic purple: carried twice by George W. Bush and twice by Bill Clinton. Moreover, it's crucial for victory. No winning candidate has lost the Buckeye State since John F. Kennedy did 48 years ago.
Political commentators have a tendency to underestimate swing voters, portraying them as fickle or even apathetic. In real life, however, political Independents are more likely to be hardworking, informed, and anything but indifferent. Campaigns describe such voters as "persuadables," but let's give them a more dignified name, one befitting their stature as discerning and influential arbiters of the contests that govern our democracy. Let's call them supervoters. If the fate of the 2008 election rests with them, we're in pretty good hands.
Purple states like Ohio are vital because of a stark reality in presidential races: All votes count, but they don't all count the same. We aren't really conducting a national election to see who replaces President Bush. Instead we're holding 51 separate contests. Except for Maine and Nebraska, which apportion their electoral votes by congressional district, states award their entire electoral prize to the candidate who gets a majority of votes. That's the unforgiving nature of our electoral college.
Some political scientists predict that the purple, battleground states are less important now because 2008 is shaping up as a strong Democratic year. (Among other indicators: Only 27 percent of voters identify themselves as Republicans.) That may be true. But we're in an era of close elections, and the traditional swing states of the Midwest and a few others might once again determine the winner.
One such state is Florida, the state that with its 27 electoral votes, the fourth-largest bloc in the nation-so famously put Bush over the top in 2000, despite his loss of the popular vote. In early August, both candidates made a stop there. McCain addressed the National Urban League, an African American organization, not so much in search of black votes but as part of a strategy to take the middle ground on race. Obama, moderating his earlier stance, suggested he was open to offshore oil drilling, a position generally favored by middle Americans. Both candidates were courting supervoters like 48-year-old Cathy Carnes of Melbourne, Florida.
"I've never felt Republican or Democratic, so I register as an Independent," says Carnes, a rental car clerk at Melbourne's airport. "I like Obama. He's fresh, he's young, he's got family values, and he isn't beholden to people or groups like the old politicians who've been around too long."
Yet Carnes is concerned that Obama might be naive when it comes to foreign policy. "It worried me when Obama said he'd talk to any foreign leader," she says. "Some of these people in the Middle East who shout, 'Death to America!'-they don't really want to negotiate."
Like Carnes, more than a third of Americans describe themselves as Independents, presumably because they're more centrist than Democrats and Republicans. Nonetheless, when it comes to their neutrality in national elections, as the saying goes, most of them already know which side they're neutral on. The remaining Independents constitute a small sliver of the electorate-perhaps just 6 percent, a number that's even smaller when you consider that the only 6 percent who matter are those in swing states.
"As Election Day approaches, the target swing voter audience gets smaller and smaller. More and more people have made up their minds," says Michael D. McCurry, press secretary during much of Bill Clinton's presidency. "Figuring out the right appeal to true swing voters-especially in the last weeks of the campaign-is a very delicate science."
Actually more art than science, those appeals must avoid alienating the nominees' political parties, the base, and causing swing voters to doubt the candidate's authenticity. This can be a difficult needle to thread. Obama, who opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start, campaigned during the primaries on a pledge to begin withdrawing American troops immediately. In midsummer, after securing the nomination, he hedged a bit, making it clear that facts on the ground would determine the timing of any such withdrawal. This caused unease on the Democratic left, but it's the kind of adaptability supervoters like Marty Sheil are looking for in a potential commander in chief.
"I don't like that we're in Iraq, but we went there and broke it," says Sheil, 50, a Hudson, New Hampshire, schoolteacher and former U.S. Army officer. "I think Obama is being unrealistic that we can get out quickly."
Sheil describes himself as 60-40 for Obama but praises McCain and voted for him in the primary. He follows two issues closely. The first is education, his profession. The second is the war in Iraq, another realm in which he has a vested interest. His second son, an Air Force lieutenant, just returned from a tour of duty there.
New Hampshire has only four electoral votes, but they've proved significant. If Al Gore had carried the state in 2000-only Ralph Nader's candidacy prevented that from happening-Gore would have won. In 2008 both candidates are pushing hard for those four votes. Obama chose the Granite State as the site of his joint appearance with Hillary Clinton after she dropped out of the race. McCain, who won New Hampshire in the 2000 Republican primary, paid a visit while Obama took his European tour.
Obama isn't the only one to move to the center on important issues. In ads and online town hall meetings, McCain has openly pitched undecided centrist voters, even Democrats, by hitting moderate notes on immigration and the environment. When asked for the best example of the Republican nominee's reaching out to swing voters, McCain confidant Mark McKinnon said, "Climate change."
McCain has made a point of publicly focusing on blue states-this gambit has been called the "Places Republicans Don't Go" tour. Similarly, Obama has gone on record about his push in red states. Privately, aides to both nominees admit that this tactic is less about carrying the states than about establishing their candidate as someone who epitomizes the values of the American heartland.
In recent elections, political pundits have coined catchy monikers for specific swing groups with signature characteristics. Ross Perot's Perotians of 1992 gave way to the soccer moms of 1996. After 9/11, soccer moms morphed into security moms for a couple of elections, to be replaced by NASCAR dads in 2004.
Conventional wisdom last summer held that the blue-collar voters over 50 who gave Obama so much trouble in the Appalachian and Rust Belt primaries would make or break him in November. But political scientists and campaign insiders sketch at least a half dozen other portraits of supervoters-the people likely to determine the outcome of the 2008 election.
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