Dukakis Trailing Badly in Electoral Vote Tally : Analysts Give Bush Huge Lead but Don’t Rule Out a Comeback by Democrats in Final Weeks

Democratic standard-bearer Michael S. Dukakis, while trailing Republican nominee George Bush by only a narrow margin in national opinion polls, faces a much larger and more dangerous deficit in state-by-state surveys of electoral votes, which actually determine who wins the White House in November.

Most analysts interviewed by The Times say Bush is leading in states with electoral votes totaling more than 200, including two of the biggest--Texas, with 29 electoral votes, and Florida, with 21. By contrast, Dukakis is thought to be ahead in states with fewer than half of Bush’s total of electoral votes.

Two hundred and seventy votes constitute a majority in the Electoral College.

The figures could change dramatically by the Nov. 8 election. But the present count, which seems to put Florida and Texas out of the Democratic nominee’s reach, imposes tremendous pressure on underdog Dukakis to do very well in seven other big states.

In addition to California--the nation’s most populous state, with 47 electoral votes--those big states are Illinois, with 24; Michigan, 20; New Jersey, 16; New York, 36; Ohio, 23, and Pennsylvania, 25.

By the reckoning of Republican strategists and some Democrats, too, Dukakis probably must carry California and five of the remaining six big states to avoid the fifth Democratic defeat in the last six presidential elections.

Staggering Task

This sounds like a staggering task for the Massachusetts governor, considering that recent polls in those states give him a clear advantage only in New York.

“Dukakis has damn small margin for error,” contended Richard Williamson, a former campaign strategist for President Reagan who is an unofficial adviser to the Bush campaign.

“That strikes me as a premature conclusion,” replied Tom Kiley, Dukakis pollster and a senior adviser to the candidate. “We would argue that we have five more weeks to go in the campaign.”

Indeed, far from giving up on all the states now consigned to Bush by most polls, the Dukakis campaign plans what sources call a “major” advertising counterattack in one of the most important of them--Texas, home state of both GOP nominee Bush and Dukakis’ running mate, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen.

Although recent polls show Bush leading in the state by 5 to 10 percentage points, Democrats believe they can win support for the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket with television commercials exploiting Bentsen’s TV debate with the Republican vice presidential nominee, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle.

Regardless of which way Texas ultimately goes, hardly anyone is ready yet to dismiss Dukakis’ chances of making a comeback in other key states around the country.

“I think we’re slightly ahead in most of the big states right now, or certainly enough of the big states to get over 270,” said Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater. “But no one in our campaign feels the election is in the bag.”

Dukakis Lead Vanishes

The campaign trend has clearly been running in favor of Bush and the Republicans in recent weeks. In mid-August, just before the Republican convention, a survey of state polls by the Field Institute, headed by California pollster Mervin Field, showed Dukakis leading in 25 states with 356 electoral votes, while Bush was ahead in only 15 states with 118 electoral votes.

A similar survey by the institute released Friday shows how far Dukakis has plunged and how high Bush has climbed in the last eight weeks.

Field’s compilation of state polls, most of them taken in September, shows Bush ahead in 27 states with 254 electoral votes, only 16 short of a majority. Dukakis is ahead in only eight states and the District of Columbia, with a combined total of 92 electoral votes.

Fifteen other states--including three of the biggest, California, Pennsylvania and Illinois--with a total of 192 electoral votes are rated as tossups. The survey puts a state in that category if neither candidate has a lead of 5 points or more.

The Republicans appear to be well ahead throughout the South and the Rocky Mountain West, which have provided the GOP with a strong foundation of support ever since the 1968 election. Meanwhile, the Dukakis campaign, like a retreating army, seems to be falling back on small enclaves of electoral votes, mostly in the Northeast, to which the Democratic Party has been confined for most of the last 20 years.

Dukakis appears to be at a greater disadvantage in electoral vote tabulations based on state polls than he does in national public opinion surveys, in which he trails Bush by an average of 4 or 5 points.

The reason for this appears to be the broad appeal of the Republicans’ conservative ethos contrasted with Democratic liberalism. Democratic strength is concentrated in a few large states, but Republican supporters are spread more evenly across the country--an advantage because the Electoral College gives disproportionate strength to smaller states.

For example, Mark DeCamillo, managing director of the Field Institute, points out that California has 47 electoral votes and Nevada has 4, a ratio of almost 12 to 1. But California has about 9.5 million popular votes compared to 287,000 for Nevada, a ratio of about 33 to 1, and it is this proportion that is reflected in national polls.

Even though the state polls seem to heavily favor Bush, their results leave plenty of room for Dukakis to reverse the trend. As the Field Institute report points out, state polls are not taken as frequently as national polls, and some of the data on which its survey was based was several weeks old.

“The national polls are on the cutting edge of opinion, while the state polls are based mostly on hindsight,” DeCamillo said.

Moreover, 13 of the 27 states in which Bush is ahead are designated as only “leaning” to him, because his lead there is only from 5 to 9 points. Those “leaning” states, with a total of 154 electoral votes, include such giants as Texas, Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey.

The disadvantage with which Dukakis began the campaign is reflected by the fact that the Republicans have carried 23 states with a total of of 202 electoral votes in every election since 1968. Those states are considered the GOP base.

Single Democratic Stronghold

By comparison, the District of Columbia is the only voting unit that the Democrats have carried in all of the last five elections.

But the Democrats can point to nine states, with 120 electoral votes, in which they have averaged 45% of the vote in the last five elections. These are, in descending order of Democratic strength, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota, West Virginia, Hawaii, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Six of those states are among the eight in which Dukakis is rated ahead in the Field Institute survey. He is also ahead in Connecticut and Iowa--the only evidence that he has so far been able to reach beyond traditional Democratic strongholds.

Times researcher Aleta Embrey contributed to this story.