June 25 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush and Democratic challenger John Kerry are deadlocked in the race for the White House as polls show neither candidate establishing a clear lead nationally or in the states that both campaigns say may decide the November election.

Growing violence in Iraq, with insurgents battling U.S.-led forces in five cities, is preventing Bush from getting a boost from five months of improvement in the U.S. job market, said Jennifer Duffy, a political analyst at the independent Cook Political Report.

``This race is what it always has been -- a contest within the margin of error that will seesaw probably through the fall,'' Duffy said. ``The country is evenly divided and the country is polarized. That is the factor that's not going to change.''

Bush and Kerry are in a statistical tie in a national poll by Cable News Network and USA Today. Kerry led by 4 percentage points in a Washington Post-ABC News poll, and a third by Fox News gave Bush a 7 point advantage. Mixed results and ties also prevailed in state polling for Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all among the so-called battleground states where Bush, 57, and Kerry, 60, are spending most of their advertising money.

Kerry, a four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts, leads Bush 48 percent to 44 percent in a nationwide poll conducted June 17-20 by the Washington Post and ABC News. Independent candidate Ralph Nader, a consumer activist who has not qualified for the ballot in all 50 states yet, would get 6 percent. The survey of 1,015 self- described registered voters has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Different Results

Bush garnered 48 percent support to Kerry's 47 percent and Nader's 3 percent in a CNN-USA Today poll conducted by the Princeton, New Jersey-based Gallup Organization. Gallup surveyed 722 adults deemed likely to vote based on questions about voting intentions and past voting behavior. The poll, conducted June 21- 23, has an error margin of 4 percentage points.

The Fox poll, conducted by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Opinion Dynamics Corp., shows Bush leading Kerry nationally 47 percent to 40 percent in a poll taken June 22-23. Fox polled 900 registered voters and the margin of error was 3 percentage points.

About a third of registered voters didn't cast ballots in the 2000 presidential election and neither the Fox poll nor the ABC- Post poll determined whether the respondents were likely to vote.

No Breakout

``Logic would indicate that improving news on the economy and even from Iraq eventually will translate to growing support for Bush, but I said that a month ago and it still hasn't happened,'' said Greg Valliere, chief political strategist at Schwab Soundview Capital Markets. ``It increasingly looks like President Bush will not enjoy a major breakout in the polls.''

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, and Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to Kerry, say the economy continues to be a decisive factor in the presidential election.

Sperling, a senior fellow for economic policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, said people aren't feeling better about the economy because their wages remain low and health-care costs have accelerated. Sperling is a Bloomberg News contributor.

U.S. companies added 1.2 million jobs through May, the best five months of job growth since 2000. The nation still has a net loss of 1.2 million jobs since Bush took office in January 2001 and the economy went into a recession.

``There is a real disconnect right now between how the economy is actually performing and how people view the economy to be performing,'' said Moore, whose group supports Republicans and advocates tax cuts.

Economy

On the economy, the issue some polls show is most important to voters, Bush's approval rating rose to 44 percent from 41 percent last month in Philadelphia-based Annenberg's survey. The poll of 1,431 adults was conducted June 8-21 and has a 3 percentage point error margin. The survey may have included people who are not registered to vote and didn't determine how likely respondents are to cast a ballot.

Moore said the war in Iraq is crossing over into voter's perceptions of the economy as newspaper headlines have been ``dominated'' by reports of violence and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

Violence increased in Iraq as the U.S.-led Coalitional Provisional Authority prepared to turn power over to an interim government on June 30. At least 100 people were killed in attacks yesterday.

War in Iraq

A majority of Americans for the first time are saying that the war in Iraq was a mistake, according to the Cable News Network/USA Today/Gallup poll. The survey found that 54 percent of adults surveyed said sending troops to Iraq was a mistake, compared with 41 percent who said that in a June 3-6 poll.

The ABC-Post poll found that 52 percent said the war in Iraq wasn't worth fighting, up from 50 percent who said that in May. In the Fox poll, 42 percent said going to war was the wrong thing to do and 50 percent said it was the right thing to do.

Bush's overall approval rating remained the same or improved in most of the polls. Forty-seven percent of those surveyed in the ABC-Post poll said they approve of the president, unchanged from last month. His approval rating was 52 percent, a 4 percentage point gain from May, in a survey by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

State by State

The presidential race is fought state by state as much as nationally because the candidates are vying for Electoral College votes that are apportioned among the 50 states based on population.

Those votes, rather than the national tally, determine who wins. In the 2000 election, Democrat Al Gore, the former vice president, beat Bush nationwide by 542,895 votes. Gore lost the election because of Bush's 537-vote margin of victory in one state -- Florida -- after the U.S. Supreme Court halted a recount in a 5- 4 decision.

Florida's 25 electoral votes, awarded on a winner-take-all basis, gave Bush 271 electoral votes to Gore's 267, one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history.

Kerry led 47 percent to 46 percent for Bush among Florida voters polled by American Research Group Inc, within the 4 percentage point margin of error. The Manchester, New Hampshire- based polling company called 600 adults deemed likely to vote between June 21 and June 23.

In Ohio, Kerry is leading 49 percent to Bush's 43 percent, according to an American Research Group poll conducted June 21-23. The poll surveyed 600 Ohio adults who indicated they are likely to vote in November.

Ohio

Bush led with 45 percent to 41 percent for Kerry, a four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts, in Fox's Ohio polling. Fox surveyed 750 registered voters June 22-23 and did not seek to determine how likely they would be to vote. The margin of error for both polls was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Ohio has 20 votes in the U.S. Electoral College, a population- based institution that apportions votes to each state in choosing the president.

In Wisconsin, which no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1984, Bush and Kerry are in a statistical tie, according to a University of Wisconsin Survey Center poll of 504 adults who were not asked whether they are likely to vote. The poll, conducted June 15-23, showed Bush ahead of Kerry 46 percent to 42 percent. Nader gained 5 percent of the backing. The poll's margin of error was 4 percentage points.

Pennsylvania voters favored Kerry 44 percent to 43 percent for Bush in a June 21-22 survey of 839 registered voters by Hamden, Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University's polling institute. The Fox poll of 750 registered voters found Bush leading in the state 46 percent to 41 percent.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jesse Westbrook in Washington at jwestbrook1@bloomberg.net; Kristin Jensen in Washington at (1) kjensen@Bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 25, 2004 17:33 EDT