Usually red state, N.D. not sold on McCain

ByABC News
September 30, 2008, 12:46 AM

MINOT, N.D. -- Sen. John McCain was on TV at the student center at Minot State University, but Megan Walser barely glanced up from the information desk as she gave directions to a freshman football player.

At 19, Walser is undecided who will get her first vote for president. Rising costs of gas, food, rent and tuition are on her mind. As the daughter of a rancher in Rhame, she's thinking about farm issues, too.

But what may have caught her eye most this presidential season was who made time to campaign in North Dakota.

"I was surprised to see (Democrat Barack) Obama in Fargo," she says. "We're kind of like a forgotten state."

Not this year. North Dakota hasn't voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, but observers across the political spectrum here say it's too soon to color the state red in November.

Nearly twice as many Democrats as Republicans turned out in February for party caucuses that gave wide margins of victory to Obama and McCain's then-rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

"This is a surprisingly tight race. It's still leaning Republican, but what's different is it's usually a lock," says Steve Light, a political scientist at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. "There's a tremendous sense of excitement about Obama among independents and the young. On this campus, it's easily the most I've seen."

Yet McCain's selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate could energize that same campus.

It's home to the seven-time national champion men's ice hockey team, the Fighting Sioux.

"The fact that she is a hockey mom is big news here," says Republican state Sen. Ray Holmberg. "She is an asset and a plus and will help him, because he does not generate crowds."

Palin may already have helped. Days before the candidates' first debate, Obama pulled out of the state. The Democrat had opened 11 offices with more than 50 paid staffers to McCain's all-volunteer effort, but as the race tightened in neighboring Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Obama campaign dispatched workers there.