In the 2000 election, this small town just west of Racine split between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The margin: less than 10 votes.

Now, fours year later, the middle-class community, like the state of Wisconsin, seems just as divided - and is getting more attention than usual from both candidates as a result.

Despite intense focus on the three biggest swing states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida - there's another Florida-size prize that the campaigns can't ignore: three states in the upper Midwest that have gone Democratic since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa together match the Sunshine State's 27 electoral votes. With the race coming down to just a handful of swing states, this region has the potential to be pivotal this year.

So John Kerry's bid for president is ending, in part, where it began: in Iowa. And George Bush is scraping for votes on political turf that is best known for nurturing liberal and progressive leaders such as Hubert Humphrey and "Fighting Bob" La Follette. In some ways, it's surprising that the three are so contested. None has voted for a Republican president in 20 years, and the last time Minnesota went GOP was in 1972. Despite those figures, however, Democrats have never had a lock on the region. Mr. Gore may have won Wisconsin, but it was by less than 1 vote per ward.

It's an area where character is often more important than party affiliation. The region is more socially tolerant than the Bible Belt, but a long way culturally from New York or San Francisco. Despite Madison and Minneapolis, these are above all blue-collar, middle-class states, ones that respect workers and farmers and want to see hard work rewarded.

While all three states are willing to elect Republicans to state government, many pollsters expected the national party to have a tougher time. The more conservative politics of the Bush administration can be a tough sell among moderate Midwesterners.

But a few trends have helped: a population boom in the far-out suburbs, or "exurbs," which tend to be more conservative, and a gradual dying-off of the older, New Deal generation, replaced by voters raised with Watergate and Vietnam and receptive to an anti-government message.

For the Republican Party in these three states, "it's like the perfect storm - they have the message, the population growth, and suburban growth at same time," says Lawrence Jacobs, director of the 2004 Elections Project at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota.

Still, he says, "it puts a real test to the national Republican Party. If they can win in the upper Midwest, it's a clear sign this is now a national party that can win both in the South and up North. But if the president ends up not winning in upper Midwest, it's probably going to spark debate in Republican circles about the resources they diverted from other highly contested states."

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