Holding an Election? First Wake the Voters. . . : Politics: Seeking to engage the electorate, political professionals rely on techniques that alienated people in the first place.

For political professionals, this fall’s election looms as a landmark struggle. It will determine which party holds the governor’s chairs and state legislatures that will draw new congressional districts following the 1990 census--and so decide control of Congress through the end of the century. Aside from presidential campaigns, no contest this decade is more important to the people who run in, manage and fund elections.

For the people who vote in U.S. elections, this campaign looks like another yawn.

Yawns were the big winner when one candidate in this fall’s California gubernatorial race--considered by some national strategists the most important in the nation--recently convened a focus group to quiz Los Angeles voters about the contenders. Many people in the room couldn’t name anything Republican Pete Wilson had done in the U.S. Senate, were unaware that Democrat John K. Van de Kamp was the state’s attorney general and believed his rival for the Democratic nomination, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, still held that job.

Because California is so vast and so much of its media pays so little attention to politics, office-seekers here probably have more trouble reaching the public than in any other state. But the problem facing Wilson, Van de Kamp and Feinstein is unique only in its severity.

Indifference is a fact of life for campaigns today. In many respects, it is the shaping fact of life. Indifference is defining the style of U.S. campaigns. Paradoxically, it is driving candidates toward greater reliance on the tools that many believe are alienating voters: rapid-fire TV ads, personal attacks and the use of symbolic, divisive “wedge” issues--such as George Bush’s 1988 criticism of Michael S. Dukakis’ membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. These tools may engender political cynicism, but they provide the flash and emotion politicians need to reach an increasingly jaded and distracted electorate. The more cynical the public, the more flash and emotion campaigns need--and the more they employ the weapons of manipulation that encourage cynicism.

For challengers, the problem is obvious: getting anyone to pay enough attention to learn their names. But even incumbents are finding it difficult to carve out a strong public profile. Although voters typically give high marks to their governors and senators when surveyed, their judgments often depend more on vague impression than deep affection.

And those numbers can plunge faster than the stock market on a jittery Monday. Sen. Alan Cranston is the latest veteran politician to learn this. Cranston has represented California in the Senate for more than 20 years, and yet the disclosure of his intervention on behalf of Lincoln Savings and Loan owner Charles H. Keating Jr. was enough to reverse the public’s opinion virtually overnight: Cranston’s ratings collapsed from 56% positive to 58% negative in Los Angeles Times polls only two months apart.

“It’s hard to think of many politicians to whom the phrase ‘beloved’ applies,” said Republican media consultant Larry McCarthy, who is working with Wilson in the gubernatorial race. “They may have won respect, not to mention reelection, but it is hard to think of many who have really a personal bond with their electorate. . . . Cranston suffers from what every politician suffers from: They have a very fragile base.”

That awareness is driving campaign strategy for the 1990s. In this atmosphere of political disengagement, TV commercials are simultaneously becoming more important and less efficient. Because so many voters lack the motivation to look elsewhere for insight into the candidates, campaigns are rushing ads to television earlier and more heavily, hoping to define themselves before their opponents do. But voters have become so accustomed to political commercials--and are so overwhelmed by the proliferation of all commercials--that they are more likely to change channels or simply ignore them, many consultants say.

Candidates find themselves in the position of farmers who have to spray twice as much pesticide to reach targets increasingly resistant to the poison. “When they see another guy with a 40-buck haircut talking about crime, zap, they change the channel,” said GOP media consultant Mike Murphy. “They’ve heard all that stuff before and there is a credibility problem. You blend into the background.”

For politicians, the communications problem is further complicated by the fractionated audience; arguably, the middle- to upper-income people who vote most regularly spend the least time watching the traditional networks and local independent channels where campaigns concentrate their ads. In fact, as some political consultants note, those upper-income households often watch premium cable channels that prohibit advertising or rent movies for the VCR--diversions that remove them altogether from an ad’s potential audience.

Thus candidates are finding fewer opportunities to reach voters. That heightens the importance of what GOP National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater has dubbed “wedge issues”--symbolic, emotional concerns that quickly divide the electorate. “This environment invites issues that people can work out without a lot of information, that are easy to understand and have a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ side,” said Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg.

Of all wedge issues, abortion now seems most potent. At a time when government actions seem distant and abstract to most Americans, abortion is the exception. It has generated such strong political reaction precisely because it appears to be one of the rare government decisions that affects individual lives. The irony is that, because the Supreme Court’s Webster decision last year gave the states more leeway to regulate abortion, this polarizing energy will be channeled primarily into the traditionally nonideological state legislative and gubernatorial races--such as the recent contests in New Jersey and Virginia. “The battle lines have completely changed,” said Michelle M. Davis, executive director of the Republican Governors Assn. (In California, because all three gubernatorial candidates share pro-choice views, abortion is likely to be less central.)

For the same reasons most campaigns will rely on wedge issues, they will remain dependent on negative advertisements. Though consultants and candidates swore off the stuff after excessively vitriolic attacks in New Jersey and Virginia appeared to backfire, don’t bet on them holstering the invective for long. The reason: When people know little about candidates and are not inclined to absorb much information, emotional, negative ads are the most efficient way to move the polls, many consultants believe. “Negative ads generally stick faster than positive ads,” said Murphy. “You get more bang for the buck.”

At the most profound level, the pattern of public disengagement from politics is becoming self-reinforcing. With each passing election, candidates seem to spend less time with ordinary people and more time shuttling between exclusive fund-raisers and recording studios--hoping that enough money and clever commercials will finally overwhelm the electorate’s indifference. This makes it logical that potential voters find little to interest them in campaigns--and politics drifts toward the margin of national life. Even as political change is opening long-shuttered societies across Europe and exhilarating millions, U.S. politics is attenuating into an insider’s game--a treadmill that isolates our politicians from the people they hope to represent. That’s a development more worthy of anger than indifference.