By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Whether you are Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, white or black, rich or poor, some candidate wants very much for you to show up at the polls for Tuesday's election.And some other candidate would just as soon you stay home.

That is why the political parties, candidate campaign committees and special interest groups from one end of the political spectrum to the other are spending millions of dollars in the Tristate alone for what, among the political professionals, is known as GOTV - Get Out The Vote.

"The candidate who has the best GOTV can defy the pollsters and turn certain defeat into victory,'' said John Green, a political scientist at the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics in Akron.

This weekend in Ohio, thousands of volunteers for the political parties and candidate campaigns in Ohio and Kentucky are waging a ground war aimed at rooting out voters likely to vote for their candidates and getting them to the polls Tuesday.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell is predicting that 47 percent of Ohio's 7.1 million registered voters will cast ballots Tuesday - slightly less than the 49.8 percent who voted in the last gubernatorial election in 1998.

In Ohio, the governor's race between incumbent Republican Bob Taft and Democratic challenger Tim Hagan is one that the polls say Mr. Taft should win, but the Democrats see a massive get-out-the-vote effort, particularly in the state's many heavily Democratic urban areas, as their only chance of capturing the governor's office.

A heavier-than-usual Democratic turnout statewide may have an even bigger impact on some races where the polls are tighter and the stakes may be even higher - the race for two Ohio Supreme Court seats and the Ohio Treasurer's contest between Cincinnati Republican Joe Deters and Cleveland Democrat Mary Boyle.

This year, Ohio Republicans are not taking any chances.

Ohio GOP chairman Bob Bennett announced the party has formed a "72-hour Task Force'' made up of thousands of volunteers around the state who will spend the weekend targeting 2,000 carefully selected precincts with phone calls, door-to-door campaigning and get-out-the-vote rallies.

Democrats, Mr. Bennett said, have "historically had the upper hand in mobilizing their base, especially in the labor community. This time I think we are better prepared.''

Mr. Blackwell, a Republican running for re-election, is one of those Ohio Republicans who concede that the Democrats have done a better job at GOTV in recent years.

"I always say that for Republicans, GOTV means `Get on TV,' '' Mr. Blackwell said. "For Democrats, it means Get On The Van.''

The power of effective GOTV was rarely so clear as it was in Ohio in 2000, when it came close to making Al Gore president.

Less than a week before the 2000 presidential election, five statewide polls had George W. Bush winning Ohio by a comfortable margin of 10 to 12 percentage points.

The gloomy polls caused the Gore-Lieberman campaign to make a decision that they probably later regretted, as they sorted out the tangled post-election legal mess caused by the Florida vote. The Gore-Lieberman campaign pulled much of its money and resources out of Ohio and put them in a state where the polling was tighter.

But it did not stop the Ohio AFL-CIO and other interest groups friendly to Democrats from mounting a massive get-out-the-vote campaign, one that resulted in tens of thousands of additional votes in the state's major urban areas.

In the end, Mr. Bush won Ohio, but by only a 3.5 percentage point margin.

Mr. Green said he was one of those who looked at the pre-election polls and said he couldn't blame the Gore-Lieberman campaign for pulling out of Ohio.

"I thought they knew what they were doing, but it turns out they didn't,'' Mr. Green said. "If they had put some more resources in Ohio at the end, Al Gore might be president now.''

The massive pro-Democratic GOTV effort in 2000 didn't end up doing Mr. Gore any good, but it did accomplish one important task for the Democrats - it is credited with allowing Ohio Supreme Court Justice Alice Robie Resnick to beat back a well-funded Republican challenger.

Now, with two more hotly contested Ohio Supreme Court seats on the ballot, Ohio Democrats are hoping that their friends in organized labor can do it again.

"The Democrats did a very good job in getting their people out two years ago,'' said Chip Gerhardt, vice chairman of the Hamilton County Republican Party. "We can't let them get away with it again.''

Traditionally in Ohio, the Democratic party has depended on its constituent groups - organized labor, black organizations, women, environmentalists and others - to do the bulk of the party's get-out-the-vote effort.

The National Coalition for Black Civic Participation is a non-partisan group, funded by dozens of civil rights and civil liberties organizations, but its get-out-the-vote effort this year in 60 U.S. cities - including Cincinnati - is the kind of campaign that could rebound to the Democrats' favor. That's because, typically, the more black voters go to the polls, the better Democratic candidates do.

Melanie Campbell, executive director of the coalition, said her group's campaign is not about helping one political party, but about "enfranchising people.''

"We recruit volunteers to go out into communities, walk the streets, go door-to-door, make phone calls, and the message is always the same - the best way to change things is to vote,'' Ms. Campbell said.

In Ohio, the Republican Party depends most heavily on county party organizations, which are generally better-funded than their Democratic counterparts.

In a major Republican stronghold such as Hamilton County, party officials are responsible for putting together phone banks, door-to-door literature drops and mass mailings targeted at voters in strong Republican areas, trying to push them to the polls.

This year, Mr. Gerhardt said, the biggest problem the Republican Party faces is complacency.

"Our voters might look at the polls showing us winning everything and go to sleep,'' Mr. Gerhardt said. "That's the worst thing that could happen.''

Some Republicans are concerned, too, that in Ohio, nearly every major city has a public school issue on the ballot, such as the school governance issue in Cleveland or the $480 million bond issue for construction in Cincinnati.

In each of those cities - Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Akron and Toledo - the campaign is being financed by the Republican-leaning business community, while the day-to-day campaign is being run by Democratic political operatives, said Mr. Blackwell.

"Republicans end up hiring Democrats to go out and find new voters to vote for school issues,'' Mr. Blackwell said. "And they end up finding voters who vote for Democrats.''

State Rep. Jim Trakas, R-Independence, Republican Party chairman in the Democratic stronghold of Cleveland, said having a well-known and successful Democratic political operative such as Arnold Pinckney running the school issue campaign "doesn't help us a bit.''

"I don't think it is any coincidence that all these cities with Democratic mayors suddenly all have to have school issues on the ballot in a statewide election year,'' Mr. Trakas said.

In an election where the perception is that few races are competitive, it may be hard for either party to get its voters to go to the polls.

"Democrats seem kind of disillusioned and not very enthusiastic about their state ticket; and Republicans think they are going to win anyway, so why get enthused?'' said Mr. Green. "There seems to be a real sour mood out there. Both parties ought to be worried.''

Email hwilkinson@enquirer.com