Twenty votes per precinct.

	Susan Walsh, Associated Press President Bush, shown during a meeting Friday with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in the Oval Office of the White House, has made campaigning in Pennsylvania a priority. Click photo for larger image.

If President Bush had attracted that much more support in Pennsylvania four years ago, millions of innocent Americans would have been spared endless lurid depictions of hanging chads.

"That's what we tell people all the time," said Leslie Gromis Baker, the mid-Atlantic regional chairman of Bush's re-election campaign. "If we had won Pennsylvania, we wouldn't have had to worry about Florida."

To reverse his 2000 loss here, Bush has visited Pennsylvania 26 times since he moved to the White House, more often than any state in which he doesn't have a home. His campaign soon will air ads in every market in the commonwealth, even though the Pennsylvania primary is still nearly two months away and Bush has no major challenger for the Republican nomination. Pennsylvania voters also can be assured that, "We'll continue to see a lot of the president," said Gromis Baker.

In Pennsylvania, as across the nation, Bush will try to rally support as "a war president" and will trade on certain legislative accomplishments, including two major tax cuts, education reform and Medicare prescription drug coverage.

Charles Krupa, Associated Press Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., dashes past his Secret Service detail while arriving for private meetings and fundraisers in San Francisco on Friday. If Kerry, or another Democrat, wants to defeat President Bush in Novermebr, that candidate will have to carry Pennsylvania. Click photo for larger image.

But even with the formidable powers of incumbency and the formidable prowess of the Bush-Cheney fundraising operation, Pennsylvania figures once again to pose a steep hurdle for the Bush campaign. On the other hand, the stakes in Pennsylvania for the Democratic nominee are even higher.

In 2000, Bush demonstrated that he can assemble a majority in the Electoral College without Pennsylvania. The nation's political geography makes it hard to construct a Democratic majority without it. In other words, Bush would like to win here, but doesn't have to. A Democratic loss, on the other hand, would almost guarantee a national loss.

"Whoever the Democratic nominee is, he's going to carry the state," argued Rep. T.J. Rooney, the state Democratic chairman. "The reason is jobs, jobs, jobs -- this administration has done nothing but bleed jobs."

Switchover state

Pennsylvania has been a weather vane in presidential elections over the past half century. After giving its electoral votes to Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower twice, it switched to Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960 and then stayed with the Democrats through Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 landslide and Hubert H. Humphrey's 1968 loss to Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon picked up the state as he squashed George S. McGovern in 1972. It went to Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, but reverted to the Republicans for Ronald Reagan's two terms and for George H.W. Bush's election in 1988. After those three terms in the GOP column, the state voted for Democrats in the last three elections.

Bill Clinton carried Pennsylvania twice. Then, in the last weekend of the 2000 campaign, Bush and Vice President Al Gore criss-crossed the state before Gore cruised to a surprisingly large 200,000-vote majority -- 51 percent to 46 percent.

One of the keys to that Democratic victory was a highly effective turnout effort in Democratic areas, brought together by an ad hoc alliance of labor unions and traditional Democratic organizations. In addition to maximizing the return from their natural base, the Democrats made dramatic inroads in the Philadelphia suburbs, once considered a GOP stronghold.

"Geographically, we have to do much better in the southeast," Gromis Baker said, referring to the suburbs surrounding the state's largest city. "We have to pick up five or six points in the collar counties."

Rooney insists that such a reversal won't happen, because, "four years ago, [Democrats] didn't have a strong governor like Ed Rendell."

Dan Fee, a Philadelphia consultant, was Rendell's press secretary in 2002 when he carried the state, along with those nominally GOP suburbs. In 2000, he was press secretary for the coordinated campaign that helped carry the state for Gore at a time when the most respected political organization in the state was rooted in the administration of former Republican Gov. Tom Ridge.

"In 2000, we had to cobble together a political organization from a variety of places," Fee said. "Now it is in place."

Gromis Baker, who was Ridge's campaign manager, said the Democrats' 2000 turnout success caught the GOP's attention.

"We learned a lesson from that," she said. "We learned to go back to the grass roots, to the things we do best."

In response, she and other Republican officials have organized training sessions for GOP activists across the state, offering crash courses in the logistics of registration, recruiting and election day get-out-the-vote procedures.

But logistics will influence the election only at the margin. How voters feel about economic conditions and developments in Iraq and in fighting terrorism will really drive the Nov. 2 results in Pennsylvania and the rest of the nation.

Rooney noted the anemic jobs picture, with Pennsylvania losing 36,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year alone. Republicans point to a raft of key measures, such as productivity and profits, that suggest the economy is now growing. But unless the job numbers start to catch up to the other statistics soon, it may be difficult to budge public perceptions.

"If Bush doesn't get consistently positive job numbers by mid-summer, it'll be too late," said Fee. "After a while the static of the campaign kind of takes over and it's hard to change perceptions."

In one effort to present his administration as a friend to manufacturing workers, Bush cast aside his free trade principles to impose curbs on steel imports, a decision hailed by steel companies and steelworkers that created one of the few Pennsylvania-specific issues likely to be debated over the next eight months. When his administration lifted the import barriers, bowing to the World Trade Organization, Bush was denounced by the same steel interests and unions, with predictions that imports would once again swamp domestic producers. But Bush caught a break of sorts when international demand subsequently sent the price of steel soaring, contrary to the predictions of his critics.

Pennsylvania has a high proportion of seniors, so the Medicare prescription-drug bill enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress is likely to be a centerpiece of the domestic policy debate in Pennsylvania. Since most of its key provisions do not kick in until 2006, rhetoric has a good chance of dominating any provable facts about its likely effect.

"What I'm hearing [about prescription drug coverage] is that there's a lot of divisions of opinion on both sides,'' said Peg Luksik, a conservative and former gubernatorial candidate for the Constitution Party. "I wouldn't want to predict who's going to win that issue, but it's going to be an issue." Conservatives, especially, have criticized the legislation's high cost at a time of rising federal budget deficits.

Gay marriage an issue here?

Another question mark lies over the electoral impact of Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages.

The gains by Gore and, two years later, by Rendell in the Republican suburbs of southeast Pennsylvania were evidence of a widely noted trend in state politics: economically conservative but socially liberal Republican voters in the East have been increasingly willing to consider Democratic candidates. On the other hand, socially conservative Democrats in the western part of the state have grown more hospitable to Republicans.

At this point, it's anyone's guess whether the strong emotions generated by the gay marriage issue will reinforce or reverse those trends.

"His statements on the sanctity of marriage will do very well in Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania is a very family-oriented state,'' said Luksik.

"Every time the president's numbers tank they trot out a wedge issue," Rooney complained. "They're trying to distract voters from issues that really matter, but the issue that matters is jobs and they can't run away from that."

It may be an exaggeration to say that Bush's numbers' have tanked in Pennsylvania, but he certainly faces a continuing struggle. Two recent surveys, one by Quinnipiac University and the other by Franklin and Marshall University's Keystone Poll, depicted Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry with narrow leads over the president in trial heats. And, in an ominous finding for all incumbents, the Keystone survey said that, for the first time since 1995, more Pennsylvanians believed the state was heading in the wrong direction than said that it was on the right track.

Kerry, of course, has not yet won the Democratic nomination, but the strong possibility that he will creates the potential for another novel dynamic in the state's presidential contest this year. Would his marriage to Pittsburgh philanthropist Teresa Heinz Kerry, widow of the late Republican Sen. John Heinz, lead Pennsylvanians to smile on Kerry as a sort of son-in-law?

"There no question in my mind that Mrs. Heinz Kerry is a tremendous asset to the campaign in general, but specifically to the Pennsylvania effort," Rooney said.

"A Heinz factor? I don't think so," Gromis Baker countered. "It will be interesting to see how it plays, but there may be a view that, 'He's no John Heinz.'"

Ralph Nader was not a decisive factor in Pennsylvania in 2000, and he'll have a hard time even getting on the ballot this year. His supporters must collect 23,000 signatures by the filing deadline in August. Four years ago, the Green Party helped gather them; this time, Nader is running as a true independent, with no support from any political party.