AP: Sep 24
Obama out to flip Indiana to Dems
By TOM DAVIES
Associated Press Writer
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- Democrats typically skip right over reliably Republican Indiana when plotting presidential campaign strategy.
Not Barack Obama.
The candidate from next-door Illinois is bidding to flip the state into the Democratic column this year. To that end, he is doing what no presidential candidate has done in decades - spending significant amounts of money and time in the state, while Republican John McCain maintains a low profile.
Obama narrowly lost the May primary here to Hillary Rodham Clinton. And in the process, he had "the opportunity to at least define himself with Hoosier voters and that has lingered," said Kip Tew, a former state Democratic chairman who is a volunteer adviser to the Obama campaign. "They competed with a ground game that no one's ever seen in the state."
Indiana, with 11 electoral votes, is one of only a handful of states where Obama's advertising has been unanswered by McCain. The Democrat has 32 offices across the state and dozens of paid staffers. His campaign spent about $6 million on television advertising in Indiana leading up to the May primary and has aired at least $1.5 million in TV ads since June. Obama has made five stops in the state since mid-July, and running mate Joe Biden was returning to the state Wednesday....
Both candidates know history is not on Obama's side: For more than a generation, Indiana has been colored in for the GOP nominee soon after polls start closing. George W. Bush won with 60 percent in 2004 and 57 percent in 2000, and the state last went Democratic in the 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide....
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Public polls taken this month show the two candidates running about even or McCain slightly ahead....
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Democrats are buoyed by how close the race is. They note that three incumbent Republican congressmen lost re-election bids two years ago, and say the state's struggling economy makes voters more receptive to Obama. The state's unemployment rate hit 6.4 percent in August, up nearly 2 percentage points from a year earlier.
An increase of more than 425,000 new voter registrations since the 2006 election, and Obama's name recognition in northwestern Indiana, a heavily Democratic area where more than 10 percent of the state's voters see Chicago TV stations, also could help. But to win Indiana, Obama also must consolidate the support of Democrats in rural areas and the blue-collar factory towns that strongly backed Clinton in May....
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/F/FLIPPING_INDIANA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-09-24-03-08-31
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