'She likes hunting and is against abortion, so she sounds like the kind of person we want.' Andrew Ward meets voters in St Peter, Minnesota
TIMOTHY STRAND knows more than most about the kind of experience Sarah Palin has to be vice-president.
He is mayor of St Peter, a town of 10,000 people, an hour's drive outside Minneapolis.
Palin has faced mockery over the fact her last job before becoming Alaska's governor was mayor of Wasilla, a former gold-mining town with a population of just 8,500.
But Strand, a Republican, believes John McCain has made a great choice of running-mate.
"I can't dispute the fact she lacks experience as far as Washington politics goes, but that doesn't seem such a bad thing to me," he says.
"It doesn't matter if you're mayor of a town of 10,000 or 100,000. You're making decisions that affect people's lives."
St Peter is the administrative centre of Nicollet County, where the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, beat George W Bush by just a few hundred votes back in 2004.
Kerry carried Minnesota by 51 per cent to 48 per cent, and it is one of the few states where the Republicans have genuine hopes of making gains this year.
The Republican convention came to the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul in an effort to bolster the party's chances in a state it has not carried since 1972.
Minnesota is part of a broader battleground that also includes neighbouring Wisconsin and Iowa, where the rural prairies meet the industrial midwest.
Recent opinion polls suggest McCain faces an uphill struggle in the region, with a CNN survey this week giving Barack Obama a 12-point lead in Minnesota.
McCain could have bolstered his prospects by picking Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota's governor, as running-mate.
Instead, he took a gamble on the less experienced, but more exciting, Palin.
Roger Braam, owner of Shot Gun Plus on St Peter's sleepy main street, said he had never heard of Palin until last week, but liked what he had heard since then.
"It seems she is a pretty headstrong lady," he says, standing behind a glass cabinet full of handguns, rifles and ammunition. "She likes hunting and is against abortion, so she sounds like the kind of person we want."
Braam's vote, however, was never in doubt for McCain. He is a lifelong Republican and, as a gun retailer, says voting Democrat would be the equivalent of a turkey voting for Christmas.
In the Embassy Bar, next to the gun shop, mid-afternoon drinkers sit nursing beers and playing cards beneath a muted television set showing coverage of the convention.
"I don't like any of them," says Tom Morgan, a retired teacher, sitting opposite his identical twin brother Steve.
"We're borrowing trillions from China to pay for the war, our schools are going bankrupt and our economy's going to hell."
Palin was picked in part to help McCain appeal to women, but Sally Kovatch, who was recently laid off when her manufacturing job with General Electric moved to Mexico, doubts if the strategy will work.
"Women aren't going to suddenly vote Republican just because McCain picked a woman," she says, walking her dog in the afternoon sun. "He should have gone for someone more experienced."
Timothy Strand says his main job as mayor is to work with small businesses, such as the Embassy Bar and Shot Gun Plus, to keep the economy buoyant.
Would he feel qualified to be vice-president?
"Absolutely not," he snorts. "And I don't have any such ambition." - (Financial Times service)