Key New Hampshire primary looms

Senator Kerry has been defending his stance on Iraq

US Democrats hoping to challenge George Bush for the White House have begun last-minute campaigning for Tuesday's critical New Hampshire primary.

Most opinion polls show Senator John Kerry in the lead, but suggest that Howard Dean is closing the gap.

Mr Kerry has accused the White House of deception in the run-up to the Iraq war, a theme popular with Democrats.

The primary is a crucial stage in selecting the party's presidential candidate for elections in November.

New Hampshire is only the second state to express its preference for a Democratic challenger, but could give a candidate a strong push towards the party nomination.

Last week Mr Kerry took a surprise lead over Mr Dean - the presumed front-runner until then - when Iowa became the first state to vote.

The latest three-day tracking poll by Reuters/MSNBC/Zogby gives Senator Kerry 31% , with Mr Dean closing the gap on 28%, and Wesley Clark and John Edwards polling 13% and 12% respectively.

Other polls have given Mr Kerry a much greater lead of around 10 percentage points.

CLOSE RACE Sample: 601 intending voters, New Hampshire Date: 23-25 Jan 2004 Margin of error: 4.1% Source: MSNBC/Reuters/Zogby

Retired General Wesley Clark is joining the race for the first time, along with Connecticut Senator Joseph Liebermann, who was Al Gore's running mate in the 2000 presidential election and is currently in fifth place.

The other two candidates are civil rights campaigner Al Sharpton, and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Mr Edwards has also emerged as a strong candidate after coming second to Mr Kerry in Iowa.

Unpredictable

"There is no question that the race has tightened up," said John Zogby, one of those conducting the tracking poll.

"Dean stopped the bleeding in the middle of the week and he has slowly regained some of the support he had lost," he said.

New Hampshire is traditionally an unpredictable state, partly because it allows independents to vote in the primary, rather than just members of the party.

Polls have suggested that between 8% and 15% of voters are still undecided.

WHAT IS A PRIMARY? State-level poll to nominate a party's candidate in the general election Held for presidential and congressional races In some states voters are restricted to choosing candidates from the party for which they have registered support 29 states permit "open primaries" in which a voter may back a candidate regardless of party affiliation. Strategic voting may take place with, for example, Republicans backing a perceived weaker Democratic candidate Primaries first emerged in early 20th Century. It was argued that leaving the nomination process to party bosses was undemocratic Q&A: New Hampshire primary State profile: New Hampshire

Foreign policy and Iraq in particular have become an important issue between the main contenders.

Judgement

Mr Kerry has accused the Bush administration of deception in the run-up to the Iraq war.

"It confirms what I said for a long period of time: that we were misled, not only in intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war," he told Fox News.

Mr Kerry also said that the Vice President, Dick Cheney, should be held accountable for saying that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

But he defended his decision to vote in favour of last year's invasion of Iraq, even though he had voted against the 1991 Gulf War when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

Mr Dean has questioned Mr Kerry's judgement.

"I think it should be the other way around... where was John Kerry when George Bush was giving out all this misinformation?" he said at the start of the last day of campaigning on Monday.

The secretary of state for New Hampshire, William Gardner, predicted that 184,000 Democrats would cast their votes on Tuesday.

He also said that 116,000 Republicans would vote in their primary, which is effectively a formality as President Bush does not face any serious opposition.