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Sunday Morning News

Michigan Journalist Provides Insight on Tuesday's Primary

Aired February 20, 2000 - 9:19 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: With us from Detroit with her perspective on Tuesday's primaries, is Carol Cain, assistant national editor of the "Detroit Free Press."

Good morning, Carol.

CAROL CAIN, "DETROIT FREE PRESS": Good morning, Kyra. How you doing there in Atlanta?

PHILLIPS: Good. I'm glad you're with us.

CAIN: Thank you.

PHILLIPS: Let's begin by talking about what we can expect in Michigan. You say it's a unique state for voting. What do you mean by that?

CAIN: Well, basically, we have the Reagan Democrats basically based here in Macomb County, which is a suburb outside of Detroit of about 700,000 people. These are the more moderate union workers who crossed over during the Reagan 1980 years. Certainly, John McCain is going to be looking at them as he comes into the state to try and help push him over the edge and pick up some momentum again. Michigan also is a very critical state for several reasons. It's the first large industrial state that comes up in this Republican primary.

Also, there are 58 delegates here in the state, which is actually more than South Carolina and New Hampshire combined. The one final thing that really plays a part here is that Michigan pushed up its Republican primary by a month for the simple reason of it wanted to impact the momentum of this campaign and that was something that Republican governor John Engler here in Michigan helped to set forth, and certainly, Michigan is going to be playing a very pivotal role through this whole process.

PHILLIPS: Sure, a lot of people know that Engler and Bush are very tight, they're very close, there's even talk that Engler will join the Bush administration if indeed Bush wins. How do you think that could affect the turnout?

CAIN: Well, certainly, John Engler, how is term-limited governor, I'll start out saying, has been behind George Bush from the very beginning. He's one of the first people, he's one of the staunchest supporters, and he's going to be pulling out the stops to get people out to the polls on Tuesday.

Michigan also has an open primary, which means anybody who is a registered voter, regardless of party, can vote. That's going to be the determining factor here. If the independents and Democrats show up, as some suggest, it could be a very interesting race. And John Engler at the end of last year predicted that Michigan would be a firewall for George W. Bush, regardless of what happened in this race up until this point.

The race has tightened up, as we see. In fact, most of the polls, including the "Free Press" show it's a statistical dead heat. So it's going to be interesting to see on Tuesday how many people actually show up.

One point I'll add on that, in the '96 GOP primary in March of '96, about a third of the people who showed up were independents. Some people think that the percentage this time will be higher. And in fact, we had about 667,000 people in the GOP primary in '96, Governor Engler last night predicted about 950,000 people.

So the numbers is important, and also who shows up to the polls, and George W. is hoping obviously that John Engler does a job of getting the governor -- the Republicans out to the polls. And meanwhile, John McCain has an uphill battle here to try and get some momentum and getting people back to the polls.

PHILLIPS: Sure. Let's talk a little about the ads, too. We're seeing a lot of personal endorsement versus focusing on messages, or ideas. How do you think that will influence the voters of Michigan, and what do you think about the ads?

CAIN: So far, both candidates have spent upwards of a million dollars in this state. They themselves have not spent that much time here, but they've been doing a lot of ads over the last week or two.

John McCain has been taking, as he has said throughout, the high road. He's not doing any negative campaigning. IT's been very personality driven. Here is a person who was a POW, an upstanding citizen, and really focusing on that.

George W. recently has changed the focus of his ads. Now he's talking about him as a reformer, he as a so-called Reagan Democrat, trying, again, to lure to that faction of the party and people in the state who might be so prone to vote that way.

PHILLIPS: Carol Cain, "Detroit Free Press," great insight, thanks for being with us.

CAIN: Thank you so much.

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