By Howard Wilkinson
Enquirer staff writer

Where John Kerry will take his new running mate today tells much about why the Democratic presidential candidate thinks that John Edwards will help put him in the White House and how important Ohio is to that goal.

First, the new team will travel to Cleveland, where one of every four Democratic voters in Ohio lives.

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Then, the Kerry-Edwards campaign will move to Dayton, a blue-collar town of particularly independent-minded voters, where more than a few of them wake up every morning wondering whether their jobs have moved to Mexico or Taiwan.

"Firing up Democrats and moving the undecided - that's what the John Edwards pick is all about,'' said Eric Rademacher, director of the University of Cincinnati's Institute for Policy Research, which conducts the Ohio Poll.

Rademacher's most recent poll, in March, showed the presidential race in Ohio a statistical dead heat, with a small group of voters undecided.

It is not at all clear that the selection of Edwards - or anyone else on Kerry's short list of vice presidential nominees - can move those undecided voters in an election that, in the end, will come down to a contest between Kerry and George W. Bush.

"It helps Kerry's ticket look younger and more in touch with regular Americans," said Terri Helsel of Mount Washington, who said she has yet to decide between Bush and Kerry. The choice of Edwards won't sway her one way or another.

"My immediate reaction was 'smart choice,' " 26-year-old Liz Brown of Westwood said. "I'm not a huge Kerry fan. I was hoping he would go for John McCain."

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., thanks the crowd after a campaign rally in downtown Pittsburgh Tuesday. During the rally Kerry announced his selection of John Edwards as his running mate. (AP photo)

Rademacher said there is little evidence to suggest that anything has happened to move undecided voters in Ohio since his last poll. But there is every reason to believe - given the number of times President Bush and Kerry have campaigned here - that Ohio will be a key state in what is likely to be a close election. Bush won Ohio by 4 percentage points over Al Gore in 2000.

As word of Edwards' selection spread, Ohio Republican and Democratic leaders tripped over each other trying to paint their own portraits of the first-term senator from North Carolina.

"A liberal, millionaire senator totally out of touch with Ohioans," Ohio Republican Party chairman Bob Bennett said.

"An outstanding campaigner; a man who can carry the message throughout Ohio,'' said state Sen. Mark Mallory, D-Cincinnati.

Edwards made an impression on Democratic voters in Ohio during his run for the presidential nomination, with his son-of-a-millworker stump speech on two Americas - "one of privilege for the wealthy, another for everyone else.''

Stanley Chesley, a fellow trial lawyer and Cincinnati's top Democratic fund-raiser, said Edwards can bring a populist message to the presidential race.

"Nobody wants to talk about anything but the war," said Chesley, who has known and supported Edwards for about eight years. Edwards can move the conversation back to kitchen-table concerns such as education and lost jobs, he said.

"He's the kind of dynamic campaigner who can get the traditional Democratic voters all stirred up," said Tim Burke, co-chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party. "And, after all, with as few undecided voters as there are, it's probably going to come down to which side gets the vote out."

Dan Williams, 25, of Northside is a voter who says he had "pretty much finalized" his decision to vote for Kerry before the naming of a running mate.

"I don't know much about (Edwards') platform," Williams said. "I don't agree with half the things Bush has done."

U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, said many voters will be turned off by a ticket of two U.S. senators with liberal voting records.

"Ohio is a moderate-to-conservative state," the Westwood congressman said. "And this is not a ticket that is in the mainstream."

Burke said Edwards' populist style and campaign stump speech on American jobs moving overseas will play best in areas of northeast and eastern Ohio, which haven't been reached by the economic rebound touted by the Bush campaign. It could also work in Southwest Ohio, Burke said.

"If you put John Edwards out in front of the Stearns and Foster plant in Lockland and talk about job loss, it's a message that could work here," Burke said.

U.S. Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said he does not see how a Kerry-Edwards argument on job loss could work in a state that has gained jobs in the past year.

"I don't think John Edwards helps Kerry much in Ohio,'' said Portman, of Terrace Park. "All it does is confirm that he is too liberal for this state.''

Edwards' biggest impact in Ohio, Rademacher said, might lie in his skill as a communicator.

So far, Rademacher said, the statewide polls suggest that Ohio voters haven't picked up on what the Kerry campaign is all about. "Edwards might do a better job articulating where this ticket would take the country," he said.

But, in the end, in Ohio as elsewhere, it will be the candidates at the top of the ticket who win or lose, Rademacher said.

"What it is about is George Bush and John Kerry."

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E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com. Ari Bloomekatz contributed.