Dan RatherIF YOU'VE seen the latest polls, which show John Kerry getting a lift from his selection of fellow senator, John Edwards as his running mate - good. Now you can forget them. You'll see a lot of polls between now and the fall - the post-Democratic-convention poll that will show a Kerry-Edwards bounce, the post-Republican-convention poll that will give Bush-Cheney a boost and, chances are, not one of them will mean a thing.
Political experts know that, in a presidential race, you don't get excited over polls until after Labour Day. Then you look again, with two weeks to go in the campaign, and then you don't take your eyes off of them in the last 10 days. They can tick off the examples from campaigns past Dukakis with as much as a 16-point lead in the late spring of 1988, Clinton in third place at this point in 1992 and then they'll tell you that undecided voters often make up their minds in the last weekend before the election (Carter dead-even with Reagan on the last Friday before Election Day 1980).
It's also worth remembering that the polls that tend to get reported in the national press are national polls. And national polls are meaningless even on Election Day (ask Al Gore, who in 2000 won more votes, nationwide, than George Bush). No, if you really want to keep tabs on the progress of the Democratic and Republican tickets through the summer months, you keep a close eye on the battleground states. And in this election year, three battleground states figure to count most of all: Pennsyl-vania, Ohio and Michigan.
The smart money says that if either candidate can win these three states that bridge the American East and the industrial Midwest, he will win the election.
GEOGRAPHICAL BALANCE
But if neither candidate can score a clean sweep, here's how it seems to break down: It's hard to see how Kerry can take the election without winning at least two out of three and even then, it's by no means a sure thing (again, ask Al Gore, who won Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2000). Bush, meantime, could squeak by with only one (likely Ohio again, without which no Republican candidate has won a presidential election). And if Bush wins two of the three, you're likely looking at four as in four more years.
Which brings us back to John Edwards, and why John Kerry chose him as his running mate. This was not your father's candidate's bid for geographical balance; it will help Kerry to have a Southern accent on the ticket, but the odds are against Edwards' delivering his home state of North Carolina, and Kerry knows it.
STRONG SECOND
Kerry's reasons for choosing Edwards are, instead, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. As a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Edwards finished a strong second to Kerry in Ohio, and made a respectable showing in Michigan (the nomination was wrapped up by the time the primaries got to Pennsylvania. Further bolstering Edwards' Midwest credentials is the late surge he put on in the Iowa Caucuses, one which almost stole first from Kerry. Moreover, exit polling showed that Edwards did particularly well among independent voters throughout the primaries. The hope, in Kerry's camp, is that all of this will translate into a formula for winning over Republican swing voters in the three key states.
John Edwards can help John Kerry by adding an infusion of energy, interest and well-delivered message to his campaign. But we won't know how Kerry's choice has truly panned out until November, when we'll find out whether the three key states will go blue or red.
Dan Rather is a veteran US broadcast journalist.
