Oshkosh is quintessential Midwest, a place where a good factory job at Leach Co., on the north side, or Oshkosh Truck Corp. across town can afford a family a good middle-class living, a nice house, a pickup in the driveway, and dinner and drinks at the Roxy on weekends.
There is a mix of old industrial jobs at factories, technical positions at the hospitals and reliable work at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Voters tend to be economically moderate but culturally more conservative. Many, if not most, hunt in the northern woods a short drive away or fish in the two large freshwater lakes hugging the city or on the Fox River, which cuts through downtown. They go to Sunday services at Catholic and Lutheran churches in higher percentages than in many other cities and, generally speaking, are dead set against gay marriage.
Whoever wins the majority in Minnesota and Wisconsin will pick up 21 potentially key electoral votes. President Bush has made special appeals to rural voters.
(Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
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Most important to the two campaigns, Oshkosh's 63,000 residents are politically split. In the last election, Gore beat Bush here by fewer than 100 votes out of about 30,000 cast. Based on the Kerry campaign's view of this election, this should be fertile ground for Democratic gains. Voters here have felt the singe of job loss -- the unemployment rate is more than one percentage point higher than when Bush took office -- and are about to experience the burn of outsourcing. Leach, a family-owned manufacturer of dump trucks, is planning to move nearly 200 jobs to Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada.
Kerry condemns outsourcing in an ad on local TV that is likely to resonate with many voters, even though most of the jobs lost so far have landed in places such as Indiana, not India. Dang Thao, a laborer who will vote for the first time in this election, said he is backing Kerry because "I think he will change [the jobs picture] a little bit for the better."
At the same time, Mark Harris, the mayor and a Kerry supporter, said the city is experiencing signs of an economic recovery. Over the past eight months, jobs have opened up at smaller manufacturing plants on the south side of town and at Oshkosh Truck, which offers some of the best-paying factory positions in the area.
"We have just gone through a recession, and we are coming out of it," said Republican Rep. Gregg Underheim, who represents Oshkosh in the state assembly. "If you are educated or if you have skills . . . you have some optimism. If you have less than a high school degree and if you have not acquired a lot of skills over the course of your working life, this is a difficult economy." The latter group often does not vote in large percentages.
A few days after visiting with his constituents door to door, Underheim said the same-sex marriage issue is stirring many voters. He recently voted against a state ban on same-sex marriages, so he knows firsthand the hostilities Kerry faces in these parts. Donna Burgett, an undecided voter, said this issue alone could tip her vote to Bush. "Marriage should be between one man, one woman, not two women or two men," she said.
Tony Leitz, a Democrat who owns a cab company in nearby Ripon, the "birthplace" of the Republican Party, was sitting in Starbucks reading a paperback copy of the Sept. 11 commission's report and lamenting how Republicans in the area are loyal to Bush. "Whatever it is, they are going to stick with George."
The story is the same throughout much of Wisconsin, a state Gore won by less than 1 percent, or 5,708 votes, and where a new poll shows Bush with a slight lead this time.
In Minnesota, the dynamics are similar, but larger and more lasting forces might be at work. Bush is running even with Kerry in a state he lost by 2 percent, according to three recent polls. The state renowned for producing a long line of liberal legends -- Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, Orville Freeman and Walter F. Mondale, to name a few -- might not seem like Bush country. Richard M. Nixon was the last Republican to win the presidential race -- in 1972.
But the state's politics have been radically altered over the past 20 years by the demise of the once all-powerful Democratic Farm Labor Party. This transformation was evident, some say complete, in the 2002 elections, when Norm Coleman, a former Democrat, was elected to the Senate as a Republican, and the GOP captured the governorship and expanded its majority in the state legislature. This year, Randy Kelly, the Democratic mayor of liberal St. Paul, shocked the state when he endorsed Bush.
David Lebedoff, a moderate Democrat from Minneapolis and author of a new book on how the demise of majority-rule governing is destroying politics, said what people outside of the state do not understand is how effective Bush's strategy has been. "The wishy-washy thing" is working, he said. "I don't think people not living in battleground states understand the saturation here."
At a town hall meeting in Anoka, a swing town just outside the Twin Cities, Kerry was asked: Are you a liar and a waffler?
The Democratic nominee said no on both counts but conceded that Bush has been successful in planting that seed of doubt for many voters. "It's the standard Republican playbook," he said. "They just say it. And if you spend enough money and say it enough," voters will react, Kerry told the crowd.
Researcher Lucy Shackelford in Washington contributed to this report.
