Candidates target swing voters

Swing voters, or those people whose loyalty is sworn to neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, could be the deciding factor in this year's presidential election. \nThis week's politics.com reporting survey predicts, if the election were held today, Vice President Al Gore would win with 226 electoral votes in 17 states, while Texas Gov. George W. Bush would carry 23 states with a total of 205 votes. These figures don't include 11 states with 107 votes, which were described as 'undecided.'\n"If the surveys are accurate, it's going to be those people who are waffling back and forth, who voted one way in '96 and are thinking of voting a different way this time, the swing voters, are going to determine the outcome of this," said Professor Emeritus Thomas Wolf, former chair of political science at IU Southeast.\nWolf said the importance of swing voters is not typical of recent elections. He credits the unusual influence of swing voters in the current elections to the amount of people who disapprove of scandals surrounding the Clinton administration.\n"Reagan's re-election was not that way," Wolf said. "Four years ago, Clinton had a comfortable lead the whole way through. It's not always that way. It's happening because of Clinton. You have a situation where he's had eight years of real economic prosperity. But there are a lot of people who are very upset with Clinton about his personal behavior."\nPolitical science doctoral student Michael Wolf said swing voters are especially valuable in this election, because there are fewer of them up for grabs then usual. He said there are two reasons why there are fewer swing voters this year.\n"First, in recent elections, the South has become rather firmly Republican," Michael Wolf said. "Clinton was able to wrestle some Southern states as a native son, but both George Sr. and Bob Dole enjoyed their largest percentage of support from the South. Considering this with the fact that the Rocky Mountain States are generally Republican strongholds in presidential elections, and considering that California, New York and Northeastern states have typically been voting for Democrats, there are not a large number of states that remain competitive."\nWhile some experts theorize about the impact of swing voters on the current election, Professor Robert Huckfeldt, chair of the political science department, said he doesn't think the influence of swing voters is anything new. \n"Swing voters decide every election," Huckfeldt said. "What (a candidate has) to be able to do is attract people who are in some sense up for grabs. That's not bad but it means that all of a sudden you have to pay a lot of attention to people who are somewhere in between. This causes a lot of conflicts sometimes."\nHuckfeldt said appealing to swing voters is what makes many people think presidential candidates are "all the same." He said Gore tries to look less Democratic, Bush tries to look less Republican and voters become confused.\n"Swing voters are people who are not entirely happy with either side," Huckfeldt said. "The candidates have to reach out to the swing voters.\n"What it usually means, for example, for Bush, Bush has been fairly successful at sounding like a moderate on the abortion issue. He's not a moderate on the abortion issue. He could appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade," Huckfeldt said.\n"He's been able to equivocate and not say that as baldly as I've just said it. Part of what happens as a consequence is people start looking at this and saying, 'There's no difference between these guys.' Well, there's a world of difference between those guys, but they're trying to attract swing voters."