CHICAGO - Ohio resident Bob Stewart says of President Bush: "He's been a world-class polarizer. I don't know if I can stomach four more years with him as president. He misled us into the war in Iraq and has mismanaged everything since."

A raging Democrat? No, Stewart is a Republican, one of an unknown number of such voters who plan to back John Kerry, out of despair over the war in Iraq and disappointment over budget deficits and social policies.

It remains to be seen whether they can tip the scales in hotly contested middle American states like Ohio as the Democratic nominee courts them and battles Bush in the final three-month dash to November's election. In past elections defections from both parties have sometimes canceled each other out.

Kerry and running mate John Edwards kicked off that fight on Friday, leaving Boston and the concluded party convention for a two-week campaign swing across 21 states.

Stewart, 44, an insurance agent from Anderson Township near Cincinnati, voted for Bush in 2000 and is a registered Republican.

"I just have a gut feeling that Kerry can be trusted to make the right courageous decisions and will make a good president. He showed that with his heroism in Vietnam," he says.

Bush is "supposed to be a conservative and yet he's run up the biggest federal deficit in history. One thing that really turned me (away from Bush) as a lifelong Catholic ... was to see Bush go to the Vatican and try to get the pope to come down hard on Kerry for his stand on abortion. That is absolutely appalling."

In Michigan, Dan Martin has run for local office as a Republican. He says his biggest disappointment is that Bush's reputation as a "compassionate, conservative" governor of Texas hasn't proven true in the White House.

"The foreign policy is a mess. The offensive in Iraq is reckless and built on bad decision making. On the domestic front I understand that terrorism has struck and he's occupied but any real progress on a domestic agenda has ground to a halt," added Martin, 32, a customer service manager at a health maintenance organization who lives in Rochester Hills.

In Tennessee, Brian Boland, a young music company manager shopping at a market near Nashville, said: "I've always voted Republican and my folks will just kill me if they find out I'm switching to Kerry this year ... but I am just frustrated with the way Bush has mishandled everything. All the untruths."

His wife said she too was switching. The Republicans carried Tennessee in 2000, even though it was the home state of Democratic nominee Al Gore.

At the same market Ron King, a black Vietnam Veteran, said: "I always voted Republican before but I'm against Bush ever since I found out that he doesn't love this country. His so-called military record is a sham. And the worst part is that he lies so much. He lied about weapons of mass destruction."

Lloyd Huff, 64, retired director of the Dayton Research Institute in Ohio, says he has "voted for a Republican in every presidential election I can remember" but it will be Kerry this time because "the Bush administration has been the most deceitful, duplicitous, secretive administration this country has ever had."

"Going to war in Iraq was a horrible, horrible mistake," he said. He accused Bush of "an arrogant, swaggering cowboy mentality ... he has done more than anyone to inflame the Muslim world by his words and actions,"

Kenneth Warren of St. Louis University, who has studied and taught about voter behavior for three decades, said turning a trickle into a trend will be a tough job for Kerry because historically Republicans tend to be faithful. Democrats are more diverse and divided, a "party of factions," and more easily hived off, as former President Ronald Reagan did with the "Reagan Democrats," he said.

Clay Richards, assistant director of the Polling Institute at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, says Kerry is getting about 11 or 12 percent of the Republican vote in Pennsylvania and New Jersey while Bush is drawing 9 or 10 percent of his support from Democrats, not a statistically significant crossover.

Before any Kerry draw could be rated similar to the "Reagan Democrats" effect, he said "the gap would have to be a lot bigger."

© 2004 Reuters Ltd

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