CLEVELAND -- Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards will compete for voters tonight in a city that has just been ranked the poorest in America and a state that is struggling to regain its economic footing.

		Online graphic Cleveland at a glance

With less than a month before Election Day, the campaigns of President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry are fighting hard for Ohio's 20 electoral votes, which stands with Florida and Pennsylvania as the most sought-after states in 2004.

In two Ohio polls conducted before last Thursday's presidential debate, Bush had opened a lead over Kerry, breaking what had been a stalemate. But other polls, such as a CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll in Ohio showed the candidates nearly even, and political analysts believe the race is still very fluid in the state, which Bush won by nearly 4 points in 2000.

Though tonight's debate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is not limited by topic, Cheney and Edwards are expected to focus on the extent of the economic recovery and the ways their respective campaigns would help create new jobs.

Job growth has been sluggish, particularly in Cleveland, a once bustling manufacturing center where 31 percent of the residents now live in poverty.

Throughout the campaign Edwards has focused on the struggles of middle class Americans and his view that there are "two Americas" divided between rich and poor. Cheney has been a booster of the president's tax cuts and has frequently predicted that the cuts will create more jobs over time.

In talking about the economy, the Bush team often proclaims that 1.7 million jobs have been created since last August and that there have been 12 straight months of job gains. But Democrats point out that some 913,000 fewer Americans have jobs than when Bush took office. Between 2002 and 2003, 1.3 million more slipped into poverty.

The economic picture is especially complicated in Ohio. While a number of other swing states gained jobs in August, Ohio lost nearly 12,000 and the unemployment rate was still higher than that of the nation.

Cleveland's unemployment rate is more than double that of the nation: 12.2 percent in August. Between 2000 and 2003, the Cleveland metropolitan area lost 65,000 jobs -- 44,000 of them in manufacturing -- and far more than any of Ohio's seven other metropolitan areas. Cleveland alone lost about 28 percent of the 233,000 jobs the entire state lost during that period.

"Given that the debate is in Cleveland ... I certainly would be shocked if John Edwards at multiple occasions didn't point out that, in fact, the Bush economic plan does not seem to have benefited Ohio very much," said Herb Asher, a professor of political science at Ohio State University in Columbus.

"[The Republicans] are going to have to talk about topics other than jobs. They can talk about home ownership rates, they can talk about low inflation, they can talk about low interest rates, but I don't think in Ohio talking about jobs has a lot of credibility."

But Jason Mauk, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party, pointed to growth in areas like Columbus and Cincinnati and noted that the president's tax cuts and his plan to create opportunity zones to bring new businesses into struggling areas could help places like Cleveland.

"The economy here in Ohio is moving through a transition," Mauk said. "Northeast Ohio and Cleveland is a great example of [that]. Where you have automotive companies that used to have 20 people on an assembly line to put a car together, now you have to have two people who know how to run a computer. "Those are jobs that are being lost that may not be re-created," Mauk said. "Everywhere you look there is evidence of growth and despite the efforts by Democrats and the Kerry campaign to come into Ohio and trash talk our economy and exploit unemployed workers, the reality is we are moving forward."

Though Cleveland has voted heavily Democratic over the years, the area ranked as the third hottest advertising market nationally for campaign commercials from the Bush, Kerry, and outside Democratic groups combined in the period from late July through the third week in August, according to the Wisconsin Advertising Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Clearly both campaigns see opportunity among the million voters registered here in Cuyahoga County; the number of new registrants for the 2004 election is twice what it was in 2000.

In August, a number of polls showed Bush and Kerry statistically tied in Ohio. But recently Bush appears to be leading Kerry.

In a Columbus Dispatch poll of 2,859 likely voters in late September (but before the first presidential debate), 51 percent said they would vote for Bush and 44 percent said they would vote for Kerry; the margin of error was 2 percentage points.

The Ohio poll by the University of Cincinnati conducted in mid-September showed that 54 percent of the 500 likely voters surveyed said they supported the president and 43 percent said they were supporting Kerry. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.6 percentage points.