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ADAM C. SMITHBoth parties and their allies are working hard in Florida to ensure that new voters who favor them cast a ballot, either on Election Day or beforehand.
The most confounding number facing the presidential strategists trying to win Florida's 27 electoral votes: 1-million.
That's roughly the number of voters added to Florida's rolls since the election of 2000.
They're newcomers to Florida. They're people previously too young to vote. And hundreds of thousands of them are Floridians who haven't voted in years - if ever - but were persuaded at churches, public housing complexes, gun shows, and their own front doors to register for this election.
These infrequent voters, targeted like never before by both parties, could decide whether John Kerry or George Bush wins Florida and the White House.
"The question is at what percentage will those folks vote and who will they vote for," said former state Republican chairman Al Cardenas. "That's probably the most significant question we all have, and we won't know that answer until after Nov. 2."
Both parties have mounted huge voter registration programs, and both sides are determined to drive up turnout among infrequent voters. Tens of thousands of campaign workers are knocking on doors, making phone calls, delivering absentee ballot forms and, starting today, driving unlikely voters to early voting sites.
So many infrequent voters have been registered and targeted in Florida and other battleground states that veteran campaign strategists are questioning basic assumptions about the Bush-Kerry contest.
"Everyone's having a really hard time figuring out what the turnout models are because we're in uncharted waters," said Steve Rosenthal, national head of America Coming Together, a Democratic group that has registered about 47,000 new voters in Florida this year. "That's why polls are all over the map. I don't think the pollsters are taking into account the people we're registering and turning out."
By some Democratic estimates, Bush will need to lead in polls by at least 4 percentage points if he is to withstand the expected Democratic turnout juggernaut. That's what happened in 2000, when polls before Election Day gave Bush a slight edge that the Democrats nullified with turnout efforts far smaller than those under way today.
Republicans in Florida say that's nonsense, given their unprecedented turnout organization that started 12 months ago and now counts more than 86,000 volunteers and some 120 paid staffers in Florida.
Along with the 10,000-plus paid and volunteer staffers who will help independently operating Democratic groups over the next two weeks, the Kerry-Edwards campaign has about 250 paid staffers in Florida.
Two weeks ago, Republican volunteers phoned or knocked on doors of 200,000 Florida households. Last week, that number grew to 280,000. They're encouraging early voting and reminding people that 537 Florida votes decided the last election.
"We're targeting Republicans with an inconsistent voting pattern and independents identified (through phone calls and personal contact) as leaning Republican," said Brett Doster, Bush-Cheney Florida campaign director.
Republicans have long dominated Florida Democrats in absentee voting, and this year the GOP will send out some 5-million absentee ballot mailings. It wants to reach most Republicans at least twice.
What's new this year is that the Kerry-Edwards campaign has the money to mail absentee ballot forms to roughly 1-million sporadic Democratic voters. At least 500,000 will also come from America Coming Together.
Various Democratic groups are using laserlike precision to reach infrequent voters. Consider the Sierra Club, aiming for the Floridian who often skips voting but is motivated more than anything else by environmental concerns. The environment doesn't move undecided voters, pollsters conclude, but it can move finicky liberal voters.
Private polling concluded that among liberal-leaning people who often skip voting, one in 12 cares deeply about the environment. These voters are overwhelmingly white, well-educated, informed - and highly cynical about politicians. Among those who voted in 2000, many are believed to have backed independent candidate Ralph Nader.
So since August, more than 1,000 volunteers and staffers for the Sierra Club have been knocking on doors and dialing phones, making repeated contacts with some 40,000 infrequent voters around the Tampa Bay area. The League of Conservation Voters is mounting a similar effort in the Orlando area.
Person-to-person contact seems to be the key to reaching sporadic voters.
"Until this election we, like most people, were trying to motivate people through ads (and publicity)," said Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope. "But the media turns out to be almost irrelevant to the motivational side."
Then there's Planned Parenthood, the health care provider and abortion rights group that is endorsing Kerry, the first time it has officially backed a candidate in its nearly 90-year history. The group works extensively with single women of all ages, and in 2000 had plenty of activists to count on in Florida.
But that didn't translate to votes. Some 25,000 Floridians signed up with Planned Parenthood to write leaders in Washington when key issues arose. After the election, it found that only about 13,000 of those activists registered to vote - and only a quarter of them actually voted.
For single women juggling jobs, kids, or innumerable other priorities, making the time to vote can be iffy at best.
"It wasn't that they didn't care about the election. Most likely they didn't vote because something came up in their life that day and they just couldn't do it," said Stephanie Grutman of Florida Planned Parenthood.
This year, her group has 30 to 60 people in the Tampa Bay area every weekend helping specifically identified single women fill out absentee ballot requests or providing rides to early voting sites. Planned Parenthood aims to bank at least 50,000 votes before Nov. 2.
Republicans traditionally have stronger turnout than Democrats in Florida. In the quest to mobilize unlikely voters, however, they also have a smaller pool of voters with which to work, as they strive to boost GOP turnout from 75 percent in 2000 to at least 80 percent this year. They've mounted aggressive voter registration drives at conservative churches, gun shows, and growing Republican counties and suburbs.
Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, had a political scientist analyze migration into ever-changing Florida and concluded the trend favors the GOP. Fewer are coming from the Democratic strongholds of the Northeast and more from the Southeast.
"That kind of change in the last five or six years I think is what has helped the Republican Party in the state and will help us (in November)," Rove said. "You have less coming from Brooklyn and more coming from Birmingham, less coming from Queens and more coming from Atlanta."
Which could explain why, as of January, Republicans had gained over 100,000 more voters than Democrats since the 2000 election. But then well-funded Democratic groups operating independently from the Kerry campaign started extensive voter registration efforts, scouring minority communities and other Democratic strongholds to put Democratic-minded voters on Florida's rolls.
By the start of September, Democratic and Republican registration gains since 2000 were virtually even, with roughly 315,000 new registrations for each party. Meanwhile, more than 377,000 independent voters have joined the rolls since 2000.
But it's far from clear that turnout efforts will be as successful as the push to register voters.
"My firm belief is, people in the past have never done the followup. There's never been a connection between registering and then communicating with these voters," Karin Johanson, Florida director of America Coming Together, said of turning out the several hundred thousand newly registered Democrats. "Half is very ambitious. That's what I would like is half."
-- Adam C. Smith can be reached at 727 893-8241 or adam@sptimes.com