The center hard to reach for Obama, McCain

updated 1:50 p.m. ET July 3, 2008

WASHINGTON - They're the most fickle voters, and potentially the most powerful. Thus, with party nominations secure, John McCain and Barack Obama now are pushing toward the center to win them over.

Meet the "mushy middle," a complex chunk of people likely to decide the presidential election but difficult to reach and hard to please.

"Yes, we can!" isn't floating their boat. Nothing much is, from either candidate.

They aren't uniformly conservative or liberal, and they don't fit strict Republican or Democratic orthodoxy. They aren't typically engaged in politics, and they don't much care about the campaign. And like so many others, they are extraordinarily pessimistic.

"To me, it's not about the party, it's about who is the best person for the job," says Pam Robinett, 47, from Wellington, Kan., who always votes. Then again, "they'll all lie, cheat and steal to get what they want."

Talk about a tough sell.

"The country's going to go to hell in a handbasket with this election," seethes James Nauman, 55, from Lutz, Fla. "I don't think Obama's qualified and McCain's another Bush. Neither of them really have impressed me."

Both will try.

Trying to appeal to the middle
A recent AP-Yahoo News poll finds that 15 percent call themselves moderates and aren't solidly supporting a candidate. More than half of this still-persuadable middle is made up of independents.

"The center always matters," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "It matters more this year. Both candidates were nominated because they appealed to independents and moderates, so how these voters make a choice between Obama and McCain will be even more decisive."

For now, at least, the race is competitive and the rivals' bases are mostly intact.

The survey, conducted by Knowledge Networks, found that three in four Republicans and three in four conservatives are backing McCain, while Obama has nearly identical support among Democrats and liberals.

So, both are tacking away from their party's ideological ends to appeal to this unpredictable swath in between.

McCain is moving away from the unpopular President Bush if not from the Republican Party itself. He emphasizes bipartisanship while pressing two issues that resonate strongly with voters of all stripes.

He "stood up to the president and sounded the alarm on global warming," one McCain commercial says. Another promotes a "bipartisan plan to lower prices at the pump, reduce dependence on foreign oil through domestic drilling and champion energy alternatives."

Video Will women back Obama? June 11: Barack Obama lost the women vote to Hillary Clinton and polls show he has a lot of work to do against John McCain with a key group: suburban women. A Hardball panel discusses. Hardball

Obama, for his part, broke from the left by backing new rules for the government's terrorist eavesdropping program, straddling a Supreme Court ruling striking down a gun ban and objecting to the justices' decision outlawing executions of child rapists. He even quoted conservative hero Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" line in reacting to North Korea's latest agreement on nuclear weapons.

His leadoff campaign commercial cast him as the embodiment of the center and pitched family values, patriotism, "welfare to work" and lower taxes. It stressed "love of country" and "working hard without making excuses" — echoes of Bill Clinton.

McCain naturally may be better positioned to capture more of the middle; he came out of the GOP's center to dispatch liberal Rudy Giuliani on his left and conservative Mitt Romney and Christian evangelical Mike Huckabee on his right. Obama emerged from the party's left to topple the more centrist Hillary Rodham Clinton.

However, Obama and McCain both won their nominations with the support of independents, moderates and crossovers from the opposite party.

Some 39 percent of voters called themselves Democratic, 29 percent Republican, and 32 percent independent in the June 13-23 survey, part of an ongoing study tracking opinions of the same group of people over the election cycle. The overall margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.3 percentage points.

That Democratic edge suggests Obama may be less dependent on votes in the middle than McCain.

Still, the likeliest path to the White House cuts through the center of the electorate.

"They're the kingmakers in American politics," said Matt Bennett, a Democratic operative at the centrist Third Way policy group. "They're the people who decide elections."

Who exactly are these power-wielding voters?

They look much like the general population. They reflect the same frustration with the status quo. A significant majority has a low opinion of Bush and Congress. They have more favorable impressions of Democrats than Republicans. Many are feeling the economic pinch. They want troops to return from Iraq as soon as possible.

Like the broad electorate, they rank gas prices and the economy as their top concerns, followed by health care, Social Security, taxes and education. Terrorism and Iraq are lower.

But there are important differences.

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