Not the battleground we used to be

With only days left before voters head to the polls to choose the next president, both major-party candidates are still spending time and money in Iowa.

The presidential campaigns paid much more attention to Iowa in 2004.

Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama are still all over the airwaves, and on the heels of McCain’s Iowa visit last weekend, Obama will campaign in Des Moines today.

This has led more than one observer to wonder if the candidates know something that public polling has not told the rest of us.  Obama has had an advantage in every poll of Iowa voters, most by large margins. Both campaigns must think Iowa is still neck and neck, or else why spend so much time here?

Iowa ceases to feel like a battleground, however, when this year’s campaign is compared to 2004, when both parties and their presidential nominees practically camped out in Iowa and battled ferociously for the states seven electoral votes.

That year, President George W. Bush visited the state eight times in the month before the election. In fact, he was in Iowa the day before voters went to the polls, campaigning in Des Moines and Sioux City.  Bush’s running mate, Dick Cheney, visited Iowa four times, including spending the weekend before Election Day campaigning in Fort Dodge and Davenport. The McCain-Palin ticket has visited only twice this month, and Palin will visit once more Monday.

Democratic nominee John Kerry visited Iowa six times in the final month, and John Edwards, his running mate, visited five times. Obama’s Friday event will be his first visit here since August.

Granted, 2008 is a very different election than 2004. The electoral map is much more wide open, and the candidates are competing in many more states this year than they were four years ago.

But much of the credit for Bush’s ability to flip Iowa, which narrowly supported Al Gore in 2000, was given to the fact that he and his surrogates spent an enormous amount of time here. It helped to drive up turnout from the Republican base, specifically the large segment of Iowa’s evangelical voters.  And that was a year when the Republicans were not facing nearly as many disadvantages as they seem to be facing in 2008.

Four years ago, the GOP had 10,000 more registered voters than the Democrats, according to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office. Coincidentally, Bush won Iowa by 10,000 votes. This year’s voter registration totals are dramatically different.  It’s the Democrats with a nearly 100,000-voter advantage now.

In 2004, the Bush and Kerry field operations were more evenly matched than the organizations working for the candidates today. Obama’s campaign has roughly four times as many paid staffers in Iowa as his opponent and more than double the number of offices around the state.

The other big difference is that Obama campaigned vigorously in Iowa in 2007, which carried him to a victory in January’s caucuses. Obama headlined more than 100 events across the state. By contrast, McCain has twice skipped the caucuses, in 2000 and 2008, focusing his campaign’s attention instead on New Hampshire. The result was that McCain finished a distant third in the caucuses behind Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

At a recent rally in Des Moines, the McCain campaign spoke of poll numbers in 2004 that showed Kerry winning the state within 72 hours of Election Day as evidence that Iowa is not lost. But of three polls released on Oct. 30, 2004, only one, The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll, gave Kerry an advantage, and that was within the margin of error. Two other polls showed Bush with a slight lead.

Republicans are still optimistic that their candidate can carry Iowa, consistently saying their internal polls have the race much closer. But regardless of polling, it is safe to say that while Iowa was one of the most hotly contested swing states in 2004, this year the focus has shifted elsewhere.