Camps find few undecided voters.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

Loretta Olson quickly interrupts the door-to-door campaigners' spiel, letting them know she's already decided on her choice for president.

Asked if she knows of anyone still trying to decide whom to vote for, the south Eugene woman's expression becomes quizzical.

"I haven't met any. I don't know where they are," says Olson, a stalwart supporter of Democratic candidate John Kerry.

If she'd had any good leads on undecided voters, campaigners such as C.J. Mann and Tom Shackelford, the two pro-Kerry volunteers who stopped at Olson's Ferry Street home, would have been eager to check them out.

To partisans on both sides of this year's highly polarized presidential race - and there are many - the idea that there could still be someone who's unsure which candidate to vote for can be difficult to grasp.

But undecided voters are a coveted voting bloc in Oregon, as in other so-called "battleground" states. Because there are so few of them, campaign workers for Kerry and for Republican President George W. Bush are having a hard time finding them.

Independent Portland pollster Tim Hibbitts says undecided voters make up about 5 percent of those who are expected to cast ballots in the Nov. 2 general election - about 95,000 of Oregon's 1.9 million voters.

That's a far cry from the 20 percent bloc that undecided voters usually represent less than two months before a presidential election, Hibbitts said.

"I don't know if it's the smallest I've ever seen, but they're definitely smaller than they've been in the past several elections," he said.

Kerry and Bush campaigners aren't focusing exclusively on undecided voters, however. They're also trying to attract new supporters through voter-registration drives and working to make sure the voters they know support their candidates actually vote.

But wooing undecided voters is proving to be a critical piece of both campaigns' strategies. Hibbitts said it could make the difference in a race that has the potential to be decided by a small fraction of the electorate.

"If the undecided voters move en masse in one direction or the other, that candidate will win," he said.

At the direction of statewide and national campaign strategists, volunteers in Lane County are busy trying to identify the undecided voters.

Dick and Doreen Doty are two of them. The Eugene couple, registered as independents, voted for Bush in 2000. But the faltering economy over the past four years has them wondering if it's time to replace Bush with Kerry.

They cite firsthand experience with the tough economy. They relocated from Troutdale after Dick Doty's employer downsized the Portland area operation where he previously worked. And their son was unemployed for two years after he was laid off from a union job as a sheet-metal worker.

The son has since found work in his field, but the new job pays less and requires him to spend much more out-of-pocket for health insurance coverage.

Doreen Doty, 53, said she worries that Bush has emphasized the war in Iraq at the expense of people struggling through an economic downturn made worse by the "outsourcing" of jobs overseas.

Her 56-year-old husband agrees. As a Vietnam veteran, he said he supports the troops fighting in Iraq. "But I just don't know if all the right reasons are there," he said.

At the same time, Dick Doty said he's reluctant to switch to Kerry, in large part for the reasons Kerry's political opponents have emphasized in their ads and public criticisms.

"It's kind of troubling. He's talking about how he's for a strong military, but he's voted against every defense spending bill, from what I'm hearing," Dick Doty said.

The Dotys said they do their best to keep up with media coverage of the campaigns, and guard against letting TV ads and potentially misleading sound bites influence their opinions.

But Doreen Doty concedes that she may not be able to pin her final choice to a specific set of issue-based rationales. "I think a person ends up voting their gut," she said.

The Dotys are among a handful of independent and Democratic voters whom Kerry volunteers Karen and Steven Myers have called on as door-to-door canvassers in the Santa Clara neighborhood's Cherry Tree Estates subdivision.

The Myerses, both educators, made no effort, other than leaving a campaign brochure, to persuade the Dotys to vote for Kerry. But like other campaign volunteers, they noted which voters said they are undecided so the Kerry campaign can return later with information that might persuade them to back the Democratic ticket.

Paige Richardson, Oregon director for the Kerry campaign, said the emphasis on persuading undecided voters won't come until closer to the Oct. 15 mailing of ballots to Oregonians prior to the Nov. 2 election.

"There are folks out there who are going to hold off on deciding until they absolutely have to," she said.

The same night the Myerses were calling on potential Kerry supporters, about 18 Republican volunteers were spread out in a leased suite of offices a couple miles away off River Road.

Bonner Hogue and his fellow volunteers were running down lists of Lane County residents who weren't registered to vote but who were considered potential Bush supporters.

Hogue, a self-described former liberal, made 40 such calls while sitting in a plastic lawn chair, reading from a script. Of those calls, he figured he'd talked to only four to five potential voters who considered themselves undecided in the presidential race.

He gave the sort of advice he said he frequently doles out to fence-sitters.

"I just tell my friends to check the voting record," he said.

That advice reflects Hogue's conviction that such a comparison will cast Bush in a more favorable light than Kerry.

"The ones who are undecided, they're really undecided," he said. "They're not going to make up their minds based on anything I tell them."

Molly Bordonaro, coordinator of the Bush campaign in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, said polling suggests that the bulk of undecided voters are in suburban areas, and that - by a small percentage - a majority are women.

Bordonaro said that when the Bush campaign starts targeting undecided voters with its messages, the pitch won't be much different from the general appeal to other voters.

"The issues these undecideds are concerned about are the same issues the majority of Americans are concerned about," she said. "The war on terror, security and safety for our country, and the economy."

Springfield resident and undecided voter Janet Roberts cited all of those issues as her top concerns. The 48-year-old mother of six and part-time hospital orderly said Kerry and Bush have both given smooth, if not fully satisfactory, promises to create jobs and make the country safer.

But she said neither candidate has so far been able to overcome her nagging doubts about their ability to deliver on their promises.

"What I'm hoping is that as it gets closer to November, it becomes clearer to me," said Roberts, a Democrat who voted for Bush in 2000.

"Either that or it's going to become more complicated."

CAPTION(S):

A union volunteer (center) wears a T-shirt urging people to vote during an orientation session for John Kerry supporters. Stacie Shukanes (left) and Amie Addison work the phones last week with other Bush campaign volunteers.