US: Ohio, where Dick Cheney and John Edwards had their vice-presidential debate early today, is a key swing state. Conor O'Clery reports from Cleveland
"The war is not the big issue here", said steel-worker Ed Cogan, shouting to be heard over the loud hissing from a red hot steel slab passing through high-pressure water coolers at a Cleveland steel plant.
"Jobs and health care, that's what people worry about," he said. "Those who work here are the fortunate ones," said union organiser Mark Granakis. "There are thousands of steel workers without jobs who have no health care or pensions."
In the 1990s the steel mills around Cleveland employed 12,000 workers. Now there are only 1,500, all employees of a single plant owned by the International Steel Group.
Overall in Ohio, some 237,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since President George Bush took office, many through jobs being outsourced abroad.
Cleveland, at the epicentre of America's rust belt, has suffered the most. It is officially the poorest of America's big cities. Traffic is light, even at rush hour. The city centre streets are deserted at night. The ride to the steel plant on the outskirts passed through blighted neighbourhoods of derelict factories and boarded up houses with rotting porches.
Mayor Jane Campbell is leading a drive to revive the city, and the once toxic Cuyahoga River, which caught fire in the 1970s, has been cleaned up.
But hundreds of thousands of residents have moved away. Unemployment in the lakeside city is at 12.5 per cent, more than twice the national average. It has always been a Democratic stronghold, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is relying on a big turnout in Cleveland on November 2nd to help balance the strong Republican vote in other parts of Ohio.
Some of the steel workers are ambivalent about John Kerry, however, preferring President George Bush's stand on the war and terrorism. Many waited until the debate last week before deciding to go with Kerry.
"Everybody watched the debate," said plant manager Bill Brake, as a long steel slab was rolled into a bale. "Many recorded it and watched it a couple of times." The comments underlines the importance of Kerry's strong performance against George Bush in winning swing voters in a key battleground state like Ohio, where Republicans and Democrats are fighting all-out for every vote.
No Republican has won the White House without first securing Ohio, with its 20 electoral votes. Bush has visited Ohio 27 times since becoming President. The Republicans have used the most aggressive technique in the party's history to rally votes in the Ohio 'exburbs', the estate of town houses where millions - many refugees from Cleveland - live along a corridor stretching along Route 71 from Cleveland south to Columbus and Cincinnati. Known as "The Plan", the campaign is based on a Tupperware sales technique that involves recruiting volunteer workers who are asked to recruit other volunteers, so a pyramid structure is created.
The Plan was masterminded by President Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, and uses computerised consumer data to identify and track likely supporters. Each volunteer gets a seven-step set of instructions to find other volunteers until the goal is reached of one Republican volunteer for every 50 voters.
Democrats are also using new recruitment techniques through organisations like America Coming Together, funded by billionaire George Soros, to register tens of thousands of new voters.
Half a century ago 40 per cent of Ohio's workers were unionised, giving the Democrats a ready-made vote-getting machine, but this fell to 17 per cent as the big industries closed and jobs went overseas. In a phenomenal surge, inspired by Republican activism and anti-Bush fervour among Democrats, more than half a million new Ohio voters were registered before the deadline on Monday.
In 2000 Al Gore abandoned Ohio after Bush took a double-digit lead, but still lost the state by only 3.5 per cent. That mistake has become a mythical part of the lore surrounding the lost election. Determined not to repeat the mistake, the Democratic campaign has more than doubled the number of field members to 75 and thrown money into TV ads. Kerry has made 19 trips to Ohio since his nomination. On Sunday he preached from the pulpit of Mount Zion Baptist Church to several hundred enthusiastic African Americans about his anti-poverty programme, and went to a high school to blame the President for failing to lead on issues like costly prescription drugs and college tuition.
Only here in the liberal north-east of Ohio did a majority vote Democrat in 2000. The Republicans dominated in the land of endless suburbs around the capital, Columbus, the most malled city in America. They had majorities in the western farm belt of corn and soya beans, in the poor rural south-eastern Appalachian region, and in the south-west sector around Cincinnati, which belongs to the Deep South.
There are in reality five Ohios where the issues differ. In the north-east, central and southwest, jobs and health care top people's concerns; in the north-west, morals and family come before the economy; and in the south-west, with its tradition of patriotism and military service, Iraq and conservative values predominate. All five Ohios will see much more of the candidates in the remaining four weeks of campaigning. The "Buckeye State" has picked the winner in all but two elections over the last 104 years. It is likely to do so again.