Candidates heading for Michigan now that New Hampshire has voted
date: Tuesday, January 8, 2008
SOURCE: The Associated Press
By: Kathy Barks Hoffmann
LANSING,
Mich. (AP) — The candidates are
coming! The candidates are coming!
With seven days to go until Michigan's Jan. 15 presidential primary,
Republican presidential hopefuls John McCain and Mitt Romney were ready to hit
the ground Wednesday with campaign appearances.
McCain plans two airport rallies, one at 10:15 a.m. at the Gerald R. Ford International
Airport in Grand
Rapids and a second at 1:15 p.m. at the Oakland
County International
Airport in Waterford.
Romney is scheduled to meet with voters at 2:45 p.m. at the
D and W Fresh Marketplace in East Grand Rapids
and will meet later with the media. He also plans to hold a town hall meeting
at Grand Valley
State University's
Grand Rapids
campus at 5:15 p.m.
Democrat Dennis Kucinich is scheduled to speak to the Troy
Democratic Club Thursday night, the first of several appearances he plans to
make in the state.
Mike Huckabee plans to speak Friday to a noon meeting of the
Detroit Economic Club, while Romney and fellow Republican candidate Duncan
Hunter are scheduled to speak at the Ottawa County Republican Party Lincoln Day
Dinner in Hudsonville that evening.
For voters who don't have time to try to see a candidate
until the weekend, there are plenty of events scheduled for Saturday, Sunday
and Monday, the last day before the primary.
All of the Democratic candidates had pledged not to campaign
in Michigan because it broke party rules by moving up its primary to Jan. 15,
but Kucinich — who hails from nearby Ohio — now plans to come anyway.
Candidates are allowed to come to the state for fundraisers, although so far
none of the Democrats have announced one.
The Democratic candidates are expected to send in surrogates
or have their supporters here in Michigan
— such as Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who backs Hillary Rodham Clinton — hold
campaign events on their behalf.
Only Clinton, Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Chris Dodd — who
dropped out of the race last week — are on the Democratic ballot. Voters cannot
vote for Democrats Barack Obama, John Edwards and Bill Richardson because they
pulled their names from the ballot and did not file the paperwork allowing
their write-in votes to be counted.
Some of Obama, Edwards and Richardson
supporters are urging Democrats to vote for "Uncommitted" in the
hopes of embarrassing Clinton or getting some
national convention delegates for the missing candidates, although Michigan has been
stripped of its delegates, at least for now.