GOP Governors Pondering a Future Suddenly Complicated by Abortion : Politics: Their hopes for gains in 1990 are less rosy. Reapportionment of the states is at stake.

With the wounds from last week’s election defeats still tender, Republican governors and political leaders met Monday in this robustly sunny resort to chart a suddenly clouded political future.

Calls for increased emphasis on education and the environment were squelched by other sounds: teeth-gnashing, backbiting and bemoaning of the turn of political events.

Just a year ago, in the flush of George Bush’s presidential victory, Republicans saw the 1990 elections as a historic opportunity to overthrow the Democrats and control the powerful reapportionment process stemming from the 1990 census.

Now, as they looked forward, mostly what they saw was the troubling issue of abortion, which is credited with breathing new life into the Democratic Party and is at least partly responsible for last week’s Democratic gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia.

“If you look at last Tuesday’s results, you are hard pressed not to say . . . that the pro-choice coalition has indeed, definitely, become a force,” Republican pollster Linda DiVall warned the governors.

“If we in the Republican Party don’t recognize that, we are setting ourselves up for some major defeats.”

The emergence of abortion as a potent tool to be wielded against anti-abortion Republicans has sent the party scrambling to regain the offensive for 1990.

Strategy for 1990

In plans outlined Monday, party leaders detailed a two-pronged approach to next year’s elections--playing down abortion while pressing issues that could overshadow that emotional topic.

Vice President Dan Quayle, in a speech here Monday, pointedly did not mention abortion but tried to rally support for a more activist 1990 program modeled after Bush’s 1988 race.

“We will continue to work and identify with issues beyond peace and opportunity,” he said, “and (will) relate to opportunity the importance of education, the importance of the environment, the importance of enhancing our competitiveness, renewing an attack on poverty.

“These will be Republican issues,” he said.

Also, Quayle underlined the firm break between the 1990s-version Republican Party with its Reagan-era predecessor. He touted the importance of government--a position precisely the opposite of that pronounced by Ronald Reagan at the turn of the last decade.

“We cannot adopt an idea that somehow all government or any government is simply evil,” Quayle said. “That’s not the case.”

In talking to reporters later, the vice president said that an emphasis on popular topics like education and the environment will help Republican candidates. And he argued that the party’s anti-abortion stance “is going to be a neutral issue.”

But other Republicans roll their eyes at such rosy predictions and worry nervously that abortion will prove the difference in 1990’s elections.

Next year, 34 Senate seats, 36 governorships and all 435 House seats will be on the ballot. More important, the elections will put into office governors and state legislators who can shape new boundaries for political districts, which will remain in force for 10 years. Whoever wins in 1990, in short, has a distinct advantage for the next decade.

Republicans are still smarting over the last reapportionment, in which Democrats controlled the process and came away with strong holds on many states, most particularly California.

Despite the success of the GOP in winning the presidency, Democrats currently hold 29 governor’s seats and control 28 legislatures. Among the 1990 battlegrounds will be California, Texas and Florida, which have gained in population and thus will gain congressional seats, and the Northeast and Great Lakes states, which are losing seats.

Major GOP Efforts

Republicans will be mounting major efforts as well in states where they are close to holding a majority of legislators in a legislative body--Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Florida among them, Republicans here said.

Republicans acknowledge that there are limits to their ability to force abortion onto the back burner. The Supreme Court, which unleashed a fury of political activity with its July decision permitting the states to place some restrictions on abortion, is due to consider the subject again next term. And abortion rights groups, which mobilized in the wake of the court decision, have vowed to exact revenge on anti-abortion legislators in 1990.

But, as they shift focus to newly embraced issues like education and the environment, the Republicans hope to take the edge off of the abortion issue by instructing party candidates to announce their position and stick to it. Many Republicans here castigated their losing gubernatorial candidates--J. Marshall Coleman of Virginia and James Courter of New Jersey--for waffling on the issue.

“You don’t shift positions,” said Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, who after the Supreme Court decision called a special session of the Florida Legislature to adopt new abortion restrictions--only to have the Legislature table the proposals.

“If you’re shifting around on quicksand based on the political winds, you’re gonna die,” he added.

Conservative South Carolina Gov. Carroll A. Campbell Jr. spoke what is rapidly becoming the party line--that voters will accept an anti-abortion stance as long as it is consistent and expressed sensitively.

There has been no large-scale test of the theory since the Supreme Court’s decision was announced.

“The problem with Republicans is that they have not gone out in advance and told the public what they believed in,” Campbell said.

“The Democrats in this instance (last week’s races) went out and defined the issue (and) left the Republican candidates there with no clear message of what they stood for. And I’m going to tell you something: You’ll beat nothing with something every time.”

Thompson Disagrees

Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson, a moderate who has opted not to run again in 1990, split ranks with Campbell on the direction that party candidates must take in the future.

“At least at the state level, a candidate in any party who takes a strong pro-life stance is going to lose,” Thompson said.

“The old days when only the pro-life movement was political are gone,” he added. “The Republican Party is going to be pushed in the direction of the pro-choice movement.”

Most Republicans agree that all but the most rabid anti-abortion activists will have to silence in 1990 their once-public demands for a constitutional amendment banning abortion and for other highly restrictive measures.

“There’s room for an offensive--but the offensive is clearly in the middle,” Republican National Committee member Haley Barbour of Mississippi said.

Like others, Barbour suggested that moderate attempts at abortion restrictions--like advocating that parents be notified when a young girl seeks to have an abortion--will remain on the agenda, because polls show Americans to be more sympathetic to them than to more comprehensive barriers.

“Politics is the art of the achievable,” he said.