Corker leads Ford in final days

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Before a crowd of well-dressed Republicans crammed into the upscale Cabana restaurant, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) praised Bob Corker’s campaign for keeping its good humor.

It takes discipline to show good humor after experiencing the grueling hours and indignities of the campaign trail. The diminutive Corker joked about aides placing a box behind the podium for him to stand on so that the cameras could film him over the crowd. Afterward, when supporters mobbed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who also attended the Sunday night rally, and mostly ignored Corker, the candidate kept his chin up and searched for his own smaller audience.

On the surface, Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.), with his movie-star good looks and celebrity appeal, seemed to be stealing the show from Corker.

At a Friday prayer breakfast in Johnson City, a small industrial town in the far eastern part of the state, people swarmed around Ford when he stepped down from the dais. The human wave included Martha Culp, who, clutching a check in her hand, pushed her walker through the crowd to shake Ford’s hand on her 91st birthday.

“Two, four, six years ago, you couldn’t have got a crowd like this on a UT football day,” said Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), Ford’s campaign chairman, referring to the University of Tennessee football game that would take place later that day about 120 miles to the west in Knoxville.

There, at the pre-game tailgating scene a few hours later, the reaction to Ford was similar. Students formed a tight crowd around him, three and four people deep, while young women jockeyed to have their picture taken with him and cameramen circled for a shot.

Meanwhile, Corker stood on the sidewalk in front of the stadium next to campaign workers holding “Corker for Senate” signs. People stopped to shake his hand and express support, but no one had to use their elbows to get a picture with him, even though Knoxville is in the heart of East Tennessee, where Corker is expected to win his biggest margins.

It takes more than popularity to win a Senate race. Campaign discipline and the issues that gel with voters are big factors.

The turning point of Tennessee’s Senate campaign may have come two and a half weeks ago, when Ford crashed a Corker press conference at the Memphis airport to confront his opponent about political attacks that Ford expected would target his family. Whether the confrontation was an undisciplined moment or a poor strategic decision is not clear. Since then, Ford’s public polling numbers have sagged while Corker’s have surged ahead.

The press-conference confrontation came three weeks after Tom Ingram, Alexander’s chief of staff, took over strategic control of Corker’s campaign. At the time, Corker trailed Ford in the polls. A Gallup poll from Oct. 1 showed him down by five points.

Republicans in Washington grumbled that Corker had not gone on the offensive against Ford soon enough after winning the Republican primary.

Ingram gave the floundering campaign needed discipline. Corker began to aggressively define himself and Ford. He has stressed his high school and college education in Tennessee, thereby drawing a distinction with Ford, who attended the St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., and later the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution.

Corker also contrasted his experience as a small-businessman and responsible husband and father to that of Ford, who is single and won his father’s House seat shortly after graduating from law school. In an attempt to further win over conservative-leaning voters, Corker has sought to portray Ford as favoring abortion rights, gay marriage and higher taxes. 

Ford now trails by between eight and 12 points, according to polls conducted by CNN, Zogby, and Mason-Dixon in the week before the election.

Ford has responded angrily to Corker, accusing him of lying about his record and waging a negative campaign. He even went so far as to call Corker the “king of slime” in Corker’s hometown of Chattanooga. But Ford may be letting his anger get the better of him.

Republicans say that by focusing on Corker, instead of President Bush, whose national approval rating is around 38 percent, Ford is playing into the GOP’s strategy. Republicans want each competitive congressional race to be a choice of candidates, not a referendum on Bush

Alexander told The Hill at the Sunday night rally that since the beginning of October Corker had succeeded in steering the focus away from Bush.

Jim Margolis, Ford’s media consultant, acknowledged that Ford’s television ads have concentrated more on his own biography, record and agenda than on the president.

“In Tennessee, the race has been less about Bush and more on some of the specific proposals that Ford has,” he said, explaining that another one of his clients, New Jersey  Sen. Bob Menendez (D), has concentrated on depicting his opponent, Tom Kean Jr., as a “rubber stamp” of the Bush agenda. 

But while pundits say that Republicans are likely to win Tennessee, Democratic strategists working with Ford make several arguments for why it’s too early to count him out.

Tom Lee, a senior adviser to Ford, said that an internal Ford poll from last weekend showed a narrow lead over Corker. He also cited a recent posting on the website for the National Review, a pro-Republican conservative publication, that reported Corker ahead by only one point in a Republican party committee tracking poll. 

“I have to believe that it’s still anybody’s race,” said John Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, located in Nashville. “Internal polls on the Democratic side are saying Ford has a lead. The key issue will end up being [voter] turnout.”

Geer said that the randomly dialed CNN poll reported contacting far too many registered voters than would be reasonable from an untargeted survey. He also said the Zogby result contradicted survey findings the polling firm released several days before, which showed a more competitive race.

A USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday confirmed that the race is closer than generally thought. It showed Corker’s lead within the margin of statistical error.

Corker has fueled speculation that the race is closer than public polls show because he has refused to release his campaign’s own internal polling data.

Another consolation for Ford is that 850,000 voters, about half the expected voting electorate, have already cast their ballots. Lee, Ford’s adviser, said that turnout in traditionally Democratic precincts was significantly higher than in traditionally Republican precincts during the early voting period.

And if black voters show up to the polls in record-breaking numbers, the voter models used by recent polls would not be accurate. Visits from Bill Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to black churches show that Democrats are placing high hopes on minority turnout in this state.

At Saturday’s prayer breakfast, Ford described his prospective victory as a matter of faith. Acknowledging the power of God, Ford predicted that the Tennessee Volunteers would win on the gridiron that day, and that he would win the election. But he may have jinxed himself. Tennessee’s football team lost to Louisiana State University after leading late in the game.