GOP chairman predicts hot race for state in '08.

Byline: David Steves The Register-Guard

The chairman of the Republican National Committee says Oregon could once again be among the battleground states in next year's presidential campaign - depending on who his party nominates.

In 2000 and 2004, both down-to-the-wire elections when both parties were scrapping for every electoral vote they could get, Oregon was targeted with multimillion dollar ad campaigns. It also became a frequent campaign stop for George Bush and his rivals, Al Gore and John Kerry.

The head of the Republican Party, Chairman Robert "Mike" Duncan, was in Oregon on Thursday to meet with state GOP leaders during a West Coast swing.

In a phone interview, he hedged on whether Oregon would retain the battleground-state status it held going into the 2004 cycle.

"I can make a case that it will be in play because some of our top-tier candidates match up well," he said. "We're making contingency plans depending on who the nominee is."

Duncan declined to say which presidential Republicans matched up well in Oregon with their Democratic counterparts and which didn't, saying he didn't want to appear to be favoring any of his party's candidates.

So far, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani has held a narrow lead in the polls ahead of fellow Republicans Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor; actor and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson; and a handful of other candidates.

On the Democratic side, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has a commanding lead over Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, and others.

Portland political analyst Jim Moore said he agreed that only certain Republican candidates - namely Romney and Arizona Sen. John McCain - would offer enough appeal to Oregon voters to put the state's seven electoral votes in play.

Moore said both men seemed to have enough background with Western issues, noting Romney's ties to Utah where he put on the U.S. Olympics, to connect with voters here.

But with McCain's campaign fading and Romney hardly a sure thing to get the GOP nomination, he said it was a good bet that Oregon would be off the presidential campaigns' radar screens - especially since Oregon went solidly for the Democrat, Kerry, in 2004 and continued trending Democratic in the 2006 midterm election, looking more like California and Washington.

"This is going to be an election where the West Coast states look pretty solidly blue unless something remarkable happens," said Moore, a commentator and political scientist at Pacific University in Forest Grove.