The Democratic presidential contenders ended their harshest attacks on each other and concentrated on rallying supporters and reaching undecided voters on Friday in a tight four-way sprint to the finish in Iowa's caucuses.
With polls showing a razor-thin spread between John Kerry, Howard Dean, Richard Gephardt and John Edwards entering the race's final three days, they said the contest would hinge on who got their supporters to Monday's caucuses, which begin the 2004 presidential nominating process.
PHOTO: AFP
"This is all down to the last 72 hours, this is who gets their vote out," said Dean, the former Vermont governor who has seen leads in Iowa and New Hampshire disappear or shrink in the last two weeks.
After weeks of negative back-and-forth attacks between Dean and Gephardt that seemed to have backfired as both drifted down in the polls, the two rivals took their most pointed television advertisements off the air in Iowa.
The Dean campaign pulled their advertisement attacking his Washington-based rivals for supporting the war in Iraq, while the Gephardt campaign ended its ad attacking Dean's stance on Medicare spending and Social Security.
"We put it on TV because we were attacked. Dick Gephardt wants to finish this campaign on a positive note," Gephardt campaign manager Steve Murphy told reporters, saying Dean had been hurt the most by a backlash against the ads in Iowa, where voters often punish negative campaigners.
Dean told reporters he also wanted to stay positive in the race's final days. "We took down our ad at the end. We're just trying to go with a positive message -- get to the polls -- and I think that's what people want at the end," he said.
Gephardt, the congressman from neighboring Missouri, is fighting for his political life in Iowa after winning the state during his 1988 presidential bid. He and Dean have the strongest ground organizations heading into the caucuses, the first step toward picking a challenger against US President George W. Bush in November.
Led by Gephardt's army of union members and Dean's grass-roots activists, the candidates will send thousands of volunteers across the state over the next three days to hunt for voters and get them to the caucuses in a turnout effort larger than anything ever seen in Iowa.
The unique nature of the caucuses, which requires participants to leave their homes and cast public votes for their candidates, puts a premium on organizations that can find and track the most likely caucus-goers.
A new Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby tracking poll showed Kerry opening a five-point lead on Dean and Gephardt, with Edwards right behind and 13 percent of likely caucus-goers still undecided.
Polling in Iowa is also complicated by the caucus process and the commitment required, and Dean said he thought the polls were missing many of his supporters.
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