Bush Has 32-Point Orange County Lead : Huge Margin May Be Enough to Carry Entire State for GOP Ticket

Two months before the election, the Republican presidential ticket holds a commanding lead over the Democrats in Orange County that is probably large enough to swing the statewide vote to the GOP if it holds up, according to a poll conducted for The Times.

The poll, taken Aug. 25-27 by Mark Baldassare & Associates of Irvine, showed George Bush and Dan Quayle with a 32-point edge among Orange County voters over Michael S. Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen--60% to 28%, with 12% undecided. If the turnout is the same as in 1984, it would translate into a margin of victory of nearly 270,000 votes in the county, Baldassare said.

Needs 200,000-Vote Margin

Analysts from both parties say a GOP candidate can expect to win a statewide race if he or she carries the Republican stronghold, with its 1.1 million registered voters, by 200,000 votes. A large margin of victory in Orange County is necessary because the rest of the statewide vote tends to favor the Democrats.

Baldassare attributed the vice president’s strong lead in Orange County primarily to the continuing popularity of President Reagan: Of those who viewed Reagan positively, 86% were also favorably impressed with Bush.

“At this point,” Baldassare said, “voters are viewing them as one and the same.” That apparent attitude will make it more difficult for Dukakis to whittle down the Orange County margin enough to achieve a statewide victory, he said.

‘Dukakis Is in Trouble’

“If it wasn’t for the association between Reagan’s and Bush’s popularity, we couldn’t make as strong an argument that Dukakis is in trouble in California,” Baldassare said. “But he is in trouble . . . .”

Both Bush and Dukakis have made California, with its 47 electoral votes, a high priority in their campaigns.

Dukakis has said that he is not conceding Orange County to the Republicans, but the latest voter registration figures show Republicans outnumbering Democrats by 54.3% to 35.3% in the county. The best the Democrats can realistically hope for is that Bush’s victory in the county is slim enough for them to make up the difference in other parts of the state.

In his landslide victory four years ago, Reagan beat Democrat Walter F. Mondale in Orange County by 414,000 votes--more than twice the Republican registration edge over Democrats in the county. Reagan’s statewide margin was 5.46 million votes to 3.92 million.

Cranston Cut Rival’s Lead

By comparison, Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston, in narrowly winning reelection in 1986, limited GOP challenger Ed Zschau’s Orange County lead to 170,000 votes. Cranston won statewide by 3.64 million to 3.54 million.

Taking his cue to a large degree from Cranston’s strategy, Anthony Podesta, director of Dukakis’ California campaign, promises to run “a very vigorous, precinct-based campaign” aimed at “Orange County swing voters, whether they be Reagan Democrats or even some Reagan Republicans.”

When questioned about the poll results, Podesta said he thought they were partly attributable to Bush’s “bounce” in popularity after the Republican National Convention. He said that even the recent spate of negative publicity about Quayle’s military service “in a funny way” seemed to help Bush because he was seen as being under attack by the media.

“Quayle became a sympathetic figure, and that helped to freeze George Bush’s moment in the sun,” Podesta said.

“The race is very fluid,” he said. “I wouldn’t advise any Orange County Republicans to sell their homes and move to Washington based on this poll.”

Not Taking County for Granted

But Bill Lacy, director of Bush’s California campaign, said he believed that “if we work at it . . . we may be able to expand a little bit on our margin there. There is a danger of taking Orange County for granted, which the Bush campaign is not going to do in 1988.”

Baldassare said Dukakis “has his work cut out for him” if he wants to match Cranston’s 1986 feat in the coming election. He said Orange County Democrats “show relatively little loyalty to their party, with only two in three currently favoring the Democratic ticket.” At the same time, he said, the polls showed 47% of the Reagan Democrats supporting the Bush-Quayle ticket.

In the poll, respondents were asked: “If the presidential election were held today, would you vote for the Democratic ticket of Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen or the Republican ticket of George Bush and Dan Quayle?” They were also asked whether their opinion of each of the candidates was favorable or unfavorable.

Interviewers questioned 506 registered voters. With a sample of that size, the margin of error is plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.