US Candidates Back on Campaign Trail in Fight for Early States

With eight days remaining until the Iowa caucus on January 3 - the first live shots in the 2008 presidential primary election - Republican and Democratic candidates returned to the stump yesterday, criss-crossing the crucial early states with renewed zeal.

On the Democrat side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the two leading candidates in what is in effect a three-way race for the nomination, planned to make 16 campaign appearances in Iowa yesterday and today.

A new poll released yesterday by a US research group showed Clinton re-establishing her lead in the state, opening up a 15-point advantage over Obama and John Edwards. The poll was conducted following heavily publicized campaign appearances by Oprah Winfrey for Obama, suggesting that the TV personality's presence had not produced the expected surge of support for the Illinois senator.

Obama plans to campaign exclusively in Iowa until the day of the caucuses. Clinton was joined by her husband, former president Bill Clinton, whose presence may have helped boost her standing, for a series of appearances in Iowan cities from Mount Pleasant to Muscatine.

Taking advantage of their absence, Edwards concentrated his energies on the other early primary state, New Hampshire, with a packed Boxing Day schedule.

For the Republicans, facing a four-way and conceivably a five-way fight for the nomination, Mitt Romney appeared in New Hampshire, where he hopes to head off a late resurgence by John McCain.

Other front runners were out campaigning in Iowa, where Romney's early lead has been all but erased by the late showing of Mike Huckabee. However, the new polls showed that Huckabee's advantage in the state, where he had risen to an 11-point lead last week, had been reduced to within the pollsters' margin of error.

With the campaign tightening, Romney focused his attacks on Huckabee, spending $16m (£8m) on a series of TV spots in the state.

Television advertising also took center stage for the Democrats, as a series of TV spots made by a group sympathetic to Edwards began to air. The group, the Alliance for a New America, plans to spend $750,000 promoting Edwards' cause in Iowa in the final days before the caucus. The activities of the group, which has already spent $600,000 on TV advertising in the state, was the source of a recent dispute between Obama and Edwards, with Obama critical of the role of outside interest groups in the campaign.

But while poll numbers shifted and the candidates bickered, the real work for the campaigns was to try to engage voters who were probably relieved to have spent a day free of the relentless advertising, personal appearances and automated phone calls that plague most American homes.

With the Christmas break behind them, the candidates were sharpening their campaign lines as they attempted to close the deal. The Clinton campaign attempted to direct voters' attention to their candidate's experience, and her personal warmth; Obama's team emphasized his promise of youth and change; Republican Rudy Giuliani - still the national front runner, but sitting out Iowa and New Hampshire to concentrate on the later Florida primary - released a new slogan, "Tested. Ready. Now." His team stressed that his medical problems of the past week, when he was kept in hospital overnight, had passed and that the candidate was fit and well.

The coming primaries, analysts concur, promise to be the most open in recent history, with no clear front runner for either party.