GOP Buoyed Over Polls, Historical Vote Patterns

By ROBERT SHOGAN

Aug. 15, 1996 12 AM PT

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TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

SAN DIEGO — As Republicans handed their party nomination to Bob Dole Wednesday night, their formula for snaring the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election is based on a combination of hope in the future and faith in the past.

Looking ahead, GOP strategists are counting on the boomlet detected by some polls this week to bloom into a full-fledged trend by early September. Their hope is that this would put their ticket within 10 points of Bill Clinton nationwide--a gap that they believe could be overcome during the fall campaign.

Looking back, they noted that states possessing nearly 240 electoral votes have consistently gone Republican in nearly all recent elections. Clinton currently has hefty leads in some of those states--most notably California. But movement toward the GOP in the polls would bring many of them back into the Republican column, party strategists believe.

Or, as Republican operative Eddie Mahe says, converting an aphorism made famous by John F. Kennedy: “A rising tide lifts all states.”

If all works out according to the schemes hatched here, the Bob Dole-Jack Kemp combination would capture enough states in the customarily Republican Deep South, Rocky Mountain West and Great Plains to accumulate something close to 200 electoral votes. The GOP ticket would get the rest of the votes needed for victory by winning four of six big Midwestern and mid-Atlantic states with a total of 110 electoral votes--Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Some GOP operatives even claim to believe that their party has a plausible chance to win the nation’s biggest prize, California, whose 54 electoral votes Clinton carried by 13 percentage points over George Bush in 1992 and where pre-convention polls showed Dole trailing Clinton by 20 points.

“I think the basic strategy is pretty simple,” said Charles Black, senior advisor to the Dole campaign and a veteran of every presidential battle since 1976.

“Dole has a base in the South and West and the Central Midwest. If he makes this a close race nationally, he’ll be ahead in most of his base states. And the battleground states will be the usual suspects--the band that goes from New Jersey across Pennsylvania, the Great Lakes states and then skips out to California.”

There is, of course, a big “if” in that sentence--and in all Republican strategies for the election--Dole needs to make the race close nationally. Pre-convention polls in most major states showed Dole behind in several states that are part of the theoretical GOP “base”--Florida, for example--and trailing Clinton by large margins in all the proposed battlegrounds.

A Mason-Dixon Research compilation of state tracking polls as of the convention’s opening day showed Clinton leading in 25 states with 300 electoral votes and Dole ahead in only 16 states with 135 electoral votes.

The good news for the Republicans is that overnight polls by television networks during the convention have shown Dole is getting the expected “bounce” from the proceedings, closing to within 10 percentage points or less of Clinton nationwide. But the gap could again widen after the Democrats renominate the president later this month in Chicago.

Some Dole strategists have argued that the GOP campaign needs to begin sending the candidate south to places like North Carolina and Florida to bolster his standing in the base states. But the majority view in his camp now seems to be that spending time in such places would be, in effect, to concede defeat to Clinton. Dole has to concentrate on winning swing states and hope that Mahe’s “rising tide” will bring the base back by itself, those strategists argue.

For now, Republicans are guardedly optimistic about that prospect--a big change since before they arrived here. Until recently Republicans found it hard to even think privately about a rosy electoral college scenario, let alone talk about it publicly, so far behind were they both in national and state-by-state surveys.

There are two major factors buttressing current GOP optimism--enthusiasm about Kemp’s potential as a running mate and the party’s long-term strength in the electoral college.

Kemp helps Dole in two ways, as Republican professionals see it. “What’s most important is what his selection tells you about Dole,” said Mitchell Daniels, White House political director in Ronald Reagan’s second term. “It shows that he is a big enough man to let bygones be bygones and not let past disagreements stand in the way of picking the best man for the job.”

And then there is Kemp himself, whose enthusiasm and buoyancy seem particularly conspicuous alongside Dole. Party strategists expect him to bolster the ticket not only in his native California but in states around the country, although few think that even Kemp, who was once a congressman from Buffalo, can help Dole in New York--one of Clinton’s bulwarks.

After the deep-seated distress over Dole’s faltering candidacy that lasted all spring, “Jack Kemp is giving every Republican activist and candidate a face-saving way to get on this ticket and ride it hard,” said Mahe. Mahe acknowledged that, as a vice presidential candidate, Kemp will not get the sort of media coverage customarily reserved for the top of the ticket but he contended that the former NFL quarterback nevertheless will be a big plus in Whistle Stop, U.S.A.

“I just hope they have that gas tank overflowing on his airplane,” Mahe said. “He won’t have the level of network coverage that Dole gets, but he will have local coverage everywhere he goes.”

With Kemp helping to charge up support at the grass roots, Republicans are counting on their longtime electoral college advantage to reassert itself. “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the electoral college is still Republican friendly,” Daniels argued.

As Republican consultant John Morgan pointed out, 12 states have voted for the Republican candidate in all seven presidential elections from 1968 to 1992. Twelve more have gone Republican six of seven times. Together, those states provide a GOP base of 238 electoral votes--just 32 short of a majority.

By contrast, on the Democratic side, only the District of Columbia has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate all seven times, while only Minnesota has gone Democratic six times for a grand total of 13 electoral votes.

Whether that reflects some inherent GOP advantage in the electoral college or merely the fact that Republicans have put up more successful candidates overall remains a matter of some debate. In either case, however, the disparity does give Republican strategists hope that past trends will give them a boost again this year.

Despite all these favorable omens, GOP general election planners are vexed by two conundrums, one having to do with California, the other with the likely candidacy of Ross Perot.

For Dole to abandon California in the face of a formidable Clinton lead would hurt party morale on the West Coast and elsewhere. Moreover, many believe that simply contesting the state would hurt Clinton by forcing him to spend money in a state he absolutely needs to win. Because the Republicans are almost certain to win in the South, “Dole can win this election without California but Clinton can’t,” said Daniels, reflecting the belief of most White House strategists.

And some believe that the GOP cannot afford to ignore the largest state. “California has to be included in a Republican strategy for 1996,” contended Daron Shaw, a University of Texas political scientist and sometime GOP consultant. “To make up for its 54 electoral votes you would probably have to win five other states.”

On the other hand, as party officials well know, competing in California is extremely expensive, consuming large amounts of both dollars and time that Dole may need to expend elsewhere. Dole aides already have said that shortly after Labor Day they will have to reevaluate their current commitment to campaigning in California.

As for Perot’s impact on the race, Dole advisor Black called that “a wild card.” Black guessed that Perot will only get half as many votes as the 19% he polled in 1992, and probably take a few more from Dole than from Clinton, with the net consequences varying from state to state.

“But if he [Perot] is going to spend a lot on television, I would like to see what he is going to say,” Black said. Recalling the damage Perot did to Bush in 1992 with his televised assaults on Bush’s economic policy, Black said: “He could help Dole win by spending $50 million attacking Clinton.”

GOP Buoyed Over Polls, Historical Vote Patterns

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