Despite a convincing win in the first debate of the US presidential race, Democrat John Kerry still faces a daunting task trying to catch George W. Bush where it counts, the election "battleground" states.
The first national poll issued after Thursday's debate gave Kerry a thumping victory that propelled the Massachusetts senator into a 49-46 percent lead in a two-man race a month before the November 2 ballot.
The Newsweek magazine survey had good news all around for the Democrat: He cut deeply into Bush's once-hefty lead on the issues of terrorism and Iraq, and opened wide margins over the president on the economy and health care.
But while the national figures were looking up for Kerry, the outlook was more problematic for him at the state level as Democrats and Republicans mapped out their endgame strategies.
The two sides crunched numbers in an idiosyncratic system that decides the presidency by 538 electoral votes apportioned among the states and garnered in separate, mostly winner-take-all contests.
For the moment, the electoral chessboard was stacked in favour of Bush, who won the White House in 2000 by five electoral votes while losing the popular tally to vice president Al Gore by more than half a million.
The president seemed assured of at least 210 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win, while Kerry had 186. Thirteen swing states with a total of 142 electors were still up for grabs.
Polls showed the Republican incumbent running strong in several states that went Democratic in 2000, while narrowing the field where Kerry had hoped to dig into Bush's column.
Of the seven most closely watched states, with 112 electoral votes, five voted for Gore and were a "must-hold" for Kerry. Yet Bush led in the midwestern states of Iowa and Wisconsin, with Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania virtual dead heats.
Bush had a small edge in the south-eastern state of Florida that was pivotal in 2000, and the midwestern state of Ohio, which he has visited 27 times this year. Kerry just spent four days in Florida and was headed for Ohio on Sunday.
The Bush campaign has been crowing they were taking the battle to Kerry's turf, making him spend time and resources to hold onto Democratic states that he once hoped to use to attack Republican fiefdoms.
But Joel Johnson, a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign, insisted Saturday the election would be the same type of cliffhanger as four years ago and the Democrats would be competitive throughout the list of battlegrounds.
Polls showed that bread-and-butter issues meant more to voters in the showdown states. So Kerry, who changed tack two weeks ago to concentrate on Iraq, was trying over the weekend to put the focus back on the economy.
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