Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.wpost From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Key States Are Focus of Campaign Homestretch< By David S. Broder=Washington Date: Sun, 1 Nov 92 09:14:31 EST Message-ID: <58.1992Nov1.091431@AmeriCast.com> Key States Are Focus of Campaign Homestretch< By David S. Broder=Washington Post Staff Writer= For the first time since Jimmy Carter in 1976, a Democratic presidential candidate enters the final 48 hours of the campaign far better-positioned than his opponent to win the White House. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton has a clear edge in 16 states and the District of Columbia that can provide all but 43 of the 270 elec- toral votes needed for victory, according to a Washington Post survey last week. He has a slight edge or better in another 15 states with 112 electoral votes that would swell his total to 339. By contrast, President Bush has a marked advantage in only nine states with 68 electoral votes and is even or slightly ahead in 10 others, with 131 electoral votes - a total of 199. That means Bush would have to hold everything in his shaky base, including a sweep of Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas, and still find 71 more electoral votes from a pool of 15 states dom- inated by Michigan, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Tennessee - a tall order. Those eight states are the focus as Bush and Clinton burn their final reserves of energy today and tomorrow on a frantic round of rallies, airport stops and television interviews, aimed at cap- turing what many observers believe may be an unusually large bloc of late-deciding voters. The election results are far from preordained, given the presence of the strongest independent can- didate in 68 years in Ross Perot and the possibility many see of a big increase in voting by disaffected citizens who usually shun the voting booth. But as of now, the historically large turnover of members of Congress seems likely to yield only a modest Demo- cratic gain in the Senate and a relatively small Republican pick- up in the House. The Post analysis comes with two special caveats this year. No third-party or independent candidate in the modern era has held as high a share of the vote this late in the campaign as Perot carries into the final 48 hours. If it starts to erode as people focus on the choice between Bush and Clinton, a large number of states - at least 25 of them - appear close enough to shift sides. Second, although there are skeptics, many state officials predict that voting turnout may be up significantly - some say dramati- cally - and these voters could well spring surprises that even a close-to-the-ground survey like this would miss. At this point, Clinton is looking very strong in the Northeast, California and the rest of the Pacific Coast, is well ahead in Pennsylvania and Illinois and is clinging stubbornly to bastions of support like Louisiana and Colorado in the South and the Moun- tain West - two areas that were part of the supposed "Republican lock" on the electoral college. Two factors give Republicans hope of Bush's pulling off what would have to be regarded as the biggest upset since Harry Truman's 1948 victory. Early last week, there was some narrowing of Clinton's margins as Republican voters came home, especially in the South and Midwest, but the trend seems to have stopped on Thursday and Friday. Additional millions of the kind of voters who backed Ronald Reagan and Bush in the '80s are still saying they plan to support Perot. If Bush can peel off some of them, he could make it a competitive race. The Dallas billionaire's strength, as measured in private and public polls in major states, sagged in mid-week, apparently in response to adverse publicity about his charges of "dirty tricks" by the Bush campaign, and then stabilized or revived slightly at week's end, as Perot continued his unprecedently heavy television campaigning. The Post survey - based on interviews with key political figures in all 50 states, pollsters and campaign consultants and offi- cials of all three national campaigns - turned up evidence that Perot may be able to compete for second place in several states, with a very outside chance of winning in Alaska and Maine, both of which have elected independents as governors in the modern era. More likely, however, Perot's support may be high enough in states as large as Texas and as small as North Dakota to put electoral votes that normally go Republican into some degree of doubt. Mike McKeon, an Illinois pollster, said he suspects many voters this year will be on a "search-and-destroy mission up and down the ballot," as they give vent, in unpredictable fashion, to the anger they have been expressing for more than 12 months at stag- nant economic conditions and offensive shenanigans by politicians and elected officials. That anti-incumbent fever, fueled by the Perot movement, affects not only Bush but scores of congressional candidates - especially those tainted by the House bank overdrafts. From Minnesota to Texas and from Oregon to Massachusetts, those tagged in "Rubber- gate" last year are still trying to make amends to their consti- tuents. But the anti-incumbent mood, amplified by term-limits initiatives expected to pass in 14 states, also is hitting officeholders whose only sin may be in having been around too long. Among the more vulnerable senators, for example, are Terry Sanford (D) of North Carolina, 75, who was elected as governor 32 years ago; Wyche Fowler, Jr., (D) of Georgia, who has been in elected office since 1970; John Glenn (D) of Ohio, who came to Washington in 1974; Bob Packwood (R) of Oregon, class of 1968; Robert W. Kasten Jr. (R) of Wisconsin, who started running for office before he was 30; and Alfonse M. D'Amato (R) of New York, who has been on one public payroll or another since 1965. In recent days, warning flags have gone up for an exceptional number of House leaders of both parties - the kind of people who usually are not bothered by campaign problems in their home districts. The list starts with Speaker of the House Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) and includes the No. 3 and 4 men in that hierar- chy, Reps. David E. Bonior (D-Mich.) and Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and the chairmen of key committees. Most of them will probably be back, but the survivors will find a vastly changed House. The survey confirms predictions that the postwar record for new members - the 118 elected in 1948 - is likely to be broken on Tuesday. But with polls showing roughly a 10-point voter preference for Democrats over Republicans, GOP gains are likely to fall well short of the 35 seats Democrats once feared they might lose when reapportionment and redistrict- ing were combined with the popular revulsion at scandals in the House bank and post office. The new House is expected to include more than 50 women - up from 29 this year. Both the Congressional Black Caucus and Hispanic Caucus anticipate a 50 percent increase in their memberships, with 13 more blacks and six Hispanics favored in districts drawn to meet the requirements of the Voting Rights Act. Virtually all those newcomers will be Democrats, a major reason the new House may be almost as Democratic as the old one, where Democrats en- joyed a 100-seat majority. On the other hand, the final days of the campaign have seen Demo- cratic hopes fade for building their current 57-43 Senate majori- ty into a "filibuster-proof" bloc of 60 or more votes. And hopes many feminists had for the "year of the woman" in Senate con- tests have also dimmed. Only one of the two Democratic women running in California - former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Fein- stein - is now favored, and women challengers in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Washington are having hard fights to retain their early leads. Meantime, the chances of women challengers winning in five other states have all but disappeared. Of the 20 Democratic seats that are up, six are in doubt. Repub- licans have an equal number of shaky seats among the 15 they are defending. Clinton's leads in states like California, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon may improve the Democrats' chances of getting more than an even break in these 12 close races. There are few gubernatorial contests this year - only 12, equally divided between the parties. Democrats are favored to replace re- tiring Republicans in Delaware, Missouri and North Carolina, while only North Dakota has a Republican clearly slated for a Democratic governorship. In Washington and Montana, the races are virtual toss-ups. A closer look at the electoral college geography shows how much the pattern of the last six presidential elections - all but one Republican victories - has been altered by Bush's recession- induced weakness and the positioning Clinton has adopted as "a different kind of Democrat." Clinton is a clear favorite in nine of the 11 states Michael S. Dukakis carried in 1988, stretching from Rhode Island to Hawaii. But he is also favored in California, which last went Democratic in 1964, and several states the Democrats have not carried since 1976 - Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, for exam- ple. Even more striking are the inroads Clinton is threatening to make into what has been thought of as Republican territory - places like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Michigan, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada and South Dakota, which have not been Democratic since the 1960s. Bush's position is somewhat similar to that President Gerald R. Ford faced at the end of the 1976 campaign, when he was strug- gling from behind against Carter and fell short. But Bush's posi- tion appears considerably weaker than Ford's was on the final weekend of that campaign, when The Post survey said Carter led in states with 214 electoral votes while Ford could probably count on 197 in his column, with 127 in doubt. Two days later, Carter won by a 297-240 count.Staff writers Dan Balz and Maralee Schwartz and researcher Mark Stencel contributed to this re- port.<02:54 11-01C9999----- Copyright 1992, The Washington Post. This story is from the Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar- chived or redistributed. For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor- poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)