Now Vice President Dick Cheney is saying hello to the Aloha State on Sunday to help popular GOP Gov. Linda Lingle promote the president. Al Gore is visiting tonight, and Bill Clinton shilled for Kerry on Wednesday in TV appearances shot on the mainland.

"The polls look so good in Hawaii that we are going to drop in," Cheney told hundreds of cheering GOP volunteers today in Wisconsin. The vice president said he and wife, Lynn, had campaigned in 48 states over the past year, "and yesterday we booked the 49th."

"Obviously it means that both Democrats and Republicans think that this thing is in play," Dan Boylan, a history professor at the University of Hawaii, told the Honolulu Advertiser. "They're so close, they have to somehow go after every vote."

The Associated Press noted the power of "second-tier states" such as Hawaii: "For example, Democrats miscalculated in West Virginia four years ago when Bush became only the fourth GOP candidate to win the state since 1932."

Zogby's latest polls show Bush also having an edge in Michigan, Minnesota and New Mexico, with Pennsylvania tied and Kerry now with an edge in Wisconsin, Iowa and the 2000 Bush states of Ohio, New Hampshire and, oddly, Colorado. (Ohio and Colorado have been especially plagued by Democrat vote fraud this year.) Some surveys show Kerry at risk of losing the Democrat stronghold of New Jersey.

Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, a Web site run by Democrats based on the latest polls, this morning shows Bush with 281 electoral votes, Kerry with 236 and neither at an advantage for Pennsylvania's 21.

An electoral count today in the pro-Kerry, anti-Bush Palm Beach Post, based on Zogby and other polls, shows Bush with 223, Kerry with 186 and 129 too close to call.

"Michigan? New Jersey?? Hawaii??? All states John Kerry SHOULD be winning, yet he is in trouble in each of them," the Republican National Committee chortled today. "And considering the fact that no Democrat has won the presidency without Missouri since the early 19th century, there's no question John Kerry is on the ropes."

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