Joni Balter / Seattle Times editorial columnist
New voters are the asterisk in Tuesday's election calculus

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Five days before the election and everyone's a political prognosticator. I put down two packs of gum and $15 on bets with friends that say Dino Rossi will become Washington's first Republican governor in 20 years. Then I got a dose of bettor's remorse and put an asterisk next to my wager.

The hedge is all about new voters, all 300,000-plus of them statewide.

The Rossi-wins argument is easy enough to lay out. Twenty-eight of the nation's 50 governors are Republicans, which says something about the public's desire to have conservative or business-oriented officials running the states.

Independent voters, especially in Washington, love to split their ticket, so after voting for John Kerry for president, which a majority of voters in this state will do, and after voting for Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, which a big majority of voters also will do, and after voting heavily Democratic in congressional races, independent voters will be searching for a Republican. They could well land on Rossi.

In my mind, Rossi would win Washington and George Bush would win re-election if it weren't for the tsunami of new voters. New voters will be the talk of the election next week.

Obviously, there is a difference between people registering and voting. If most newly registered citizens actually get off their sofa/duff/bench and vote, they could change the election's outcome, sending Democratic Attorney General Christine Gregoire to the governor's mansion and Kerry to the White House.

Likely voters who participated in 2000 lean toward Bush 50-46 percent, according to the latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey released this week. But likely voters who didn't cast ballots four years ago are strikingly pro-Kerry, 59-40 percent.

In Washington state, nearly half of all newly registered voters reside in King County, where 138,729 new people have signed up to vote since January. That represents a 40-percent increase over the number of people who signed up to vote in the 10 months leading up to the 2000 election.

With that kind of activity in King County, it is not too big a leap to say many of these people are young, Democratic and fiercely anti-war. At least that was my experience at Tuesday's Democracy Fest at the University of Washington, co-sponsored by The Seattle Times editorial page. A half-dozen voters I approached were for Kerry. And the three who were tracking the governor's race were for Gregoire.

New voters make up nearly 10 percent of the total registered voters in Washington, which was 3.3 million in the last presidential election and closer to 3.2 million in the 2002 congressional election.

New voters are people turning 18, new citizens, new arrivals or bona fide fence-sitters now motivated by the war, a desire to protect the institution of marriage, or the single most powerful impetus in politics: change.

Interestingly, Paul Berendt, chairman of the state Democratic Party, and Chris Vance, chairman of the state Republican Party, both say the parties or groups connected with them have signed up roughly 80,000 new voters — each.

All this high-level, pre-election Ouija board fancywork cannot overlook the fact that Republicans have never done much work registering new voters until this election. This year, the GOP has conducted its most aggressive ground game ever.

The state GOP goal for new registrants was 34,000; the party signed 35,000 new Republican voters. A vigorous church-oriented effort that produced 45,000 additional new voters, mostly evangelical Christians, helps explain the GOP optimism, and yes, they expect that to trickle down to Rossi.

Democrats crow about their party registration effort of 20,000 to 25,000 new voters, new recruits bolstered by a group called America Coming Together, which may have registered another 56,000 Democrats in the state.

Pollsters know about some of the new voters, because they frequently get lists of newly registered voters and include these people in polls. There is always a time lag. Pollsters everywhere are missing perhaps 3 percent of voters who only have cellphones. They don't random-dial cellphones because the customer has to pay for the call.

Berendt thinks Democrats will be helped by another factor: increased participation this year by Americans living overseas.

Granted, a majority of military families support Bush and other Republicans. But others are Americans living abroad embarrassed by Bush's treatment of our allies before and during the war.

The story of next week's election will be new voters who are driving pollsters and political-campaign geniuses bonkers because people who can't stand not knowing cannot fully predict the impact of new voters.

And that puts Rossi safely, squarely, quietly, back into the "maybe" category.

Joni Balter's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is jbalter@seattletimes.com. Look for more of her thoughts on the STOP blog, our editorial online journal at www.seattletimes.com/stop