CALLING IT AS THEY SEE IT : When results don’t live up to expectations, perception is reality. : Nation: The Republicans are in trouble.

A midterm election is like a cheap circus. Ancient elephants, toothless tigers, chattering monkeys, a couple of high-wire acts and lots of clowns. But no main event.

In the political circus, the main event is a presidential election. Without a main event, the same thing happens in an election as in a circus: fewer customers show up. Turnout in the 1988 presidential election was 50% of those old enough to vote. At the 1986 midterm, only 33% showed up. Without a main event, you lose one-third of your audience.

In a midterm, it’s not just a matter of how many people vote. It’s also a matter of who votes. If either Democrats or Republicans stay home in large numbers, the other party prospers.

That’s why Republican strategists are worried this year. Republicans are demoralized. They’ve lost all their issues. Anti-communism? Gone with the Wall. Anti-abortion? That can get a candidate in big trouble. Anti-tax? “Read my flips.”

Meanwhile, Democrats are angry. Working people are angry about the recession. Middle-class people are angry about taxes. Farmers and senior citizens are angry about budget cuts. Blacks are angry about the President’s veto of the civil-rights bill. The rule is angry people vote. Demoralized people stay home.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Republicans hoped the voters would be angry at everybody and come out in record numbers to vote against all incumbents. Since there are more incumbent Democrats than Republicans, the Democrats would pay a greater price.

That’s not going to happen. The polls show a revolt against incumbency but not against incumbents. People think Congress is doing a terrible job. But their own congressman is OK. Out of 32 senators, 25 governors and 405 members of Congress running for reelection this year, precisely one was defeated in a primary. And he had been convicted of a sex crime.

People will still vote for incumbents. But they will also vote for measures to set term limits for incumbents in California and Colorado, the two states where such measures are on the ballot. What the voters are saying is, “Stop us before we reelect again.”

You get an anti-incumbent revolt when vast numbers of angry people who rarely vote show up at the polls and make trouble. They did that in two primaries this year--voting against incumbents who weren’t even running in Massachusetts (Michael S. Dukakis) and the District of Columbia (Marion S. Barry Jr.). Studies show, however, that overall primary turnout was down. With George Bush, there is no hate factor. Just disappointment.

So the Democrats are likely to win a respectable victory--net gains of one or two Senate seats, 8-12 House seats and two or three governors. The Republicans have only one hope: If they can’t win the election, maybe they can win the interpretation.

Democrats will claim these as spectacular gains--given what Republicans were saying at the beginning of the year. Back then, when Bush was at his peak of popularity and Democrats were demoralized, Republicans boasted they would knock off three or four incumbent Democratic senators and pick up seats in the House.

Republicans will talk about how modest this year’s Democratic gains were, especially given the Democrats’ great expectations. This is, after all, a recession year, Republicans will say, and the Democrats did not come close to the 26 House seats and seven new governors they gained in 1982, the last recession year.

Maybe not, the Democrats will respond, but that’s because the party was in a far stronger position going into the 1990 election than into the 1982 election. With 258 House seats now, as compared with 243 in 1982, the Democrats just couldn’t gain that many more.

In U.S. politics, winning the interpretation is just as important as winning the election. For example, winning the interpretation will help the Democrats realize their goal of constructing a veto-proof majority in Congress.

Right now, there’s a stalemate in Washington. Bush can’t get what he wants out of Congress, and the Democrats in Congress don’t have enough votes to override the President’s vetoes. But if 1990 is seen as a big defeat for the President, Congress will find it much easier to override his vetoes. Wavering Democrats will gain the courage to stand up to Bush, and wavering Republicans will continue to defy the President--as they did in last month’s budget vote. The Democrats will use the election to make the case that Bush is a loser.

What the Democrats won’t say is that the deck was always stacked in their favor, even without the bad economy and Bush’s flip-flops. Look at the history of the 34 Senate seats up this year. Those seats have always been contested in good Republican years. They were last up in 1984, the year of the Reagan landslide. Before that, they were up in 1978, the year of the tax revolt. Before that, 1972, Richard M. Nixon’s landslide. Before that, 1966, the backlash against Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Sooner or later, the Republicans’ luck with this Senate class was bound to run out.

The GOP tried to limit the damage by going on the offensive. They convinced eight Republican representatives to give up safe House seats and run for the Senate. GOP strategists boasted that these experienced candidates would knock off Democratic incumbents like Paul Simon of Illinois, Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and Carl Levin of Michigan.

Wrong. Every Democratic incumbent in the Senate looks safe, with two possible exceptions: Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, who was appointed, and John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, facing an inexperienced outsider.

Instead, GOP incumbents are threatened. The threats are coming from challengers who have never held state or federal office. Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon may lose to a businessman. Rudy Boschwitz of Minnesota is facing a tough challenge from a young college professor who supported Jesse Jackson for President.

One other Republican incumbent is in trouble. Jesse Helms of North Carolina is locked in a tight race with Harvey Gantt, a black architect. Helms vs. Gantt is the ultimate political contest: The Terminator versus the Equalizer.

Can Gantt really win? Yes. And it wouldn’t be such a big surprise either. Helms has always won when national conditions brought out a big Republican vote. And he has never gotten more than 54.5%. In other words, Helms was vulnerable this year. But forget all that. The bottom line is that, if Helms is defeated by a black man on Tuesday, secular humanists will go to church.

The odds also favor the Democrats in this year’s races for governor. The Republicans gained eight governorships in 1986, and they have to defend them all this year. The governors’ races are important to the GOP for one reason--redistricting. If Republican governors can hold on in the big states, the GOP controls the redistricting process and keeps the Democrats from locking up control of the House for another decade.

So once again, the Republicans went out and found strong candidates like Pete Wilson in California, George Voinovich in Ohio, Clayton Williams in Texas and Jim Edgar in Illinois. Lucky thing, too, because all these races are turning out to be unexpectedly tight.

The Republicans were not so lucky in New York. Bush may dream about getting rid of Mario M. Cuomo, but the only candidate the Republicans could come up with was a lunatic economist named Pierre Rinfret. Cuomo might have been vulnerable this year; he has raised taxes and increased spending in New York.

As it turns out, however, there are only two issues in New York’s election for governor: Will Cuomo beat his own 1986 reelection record (65%)? And will the Republican candidate end up in third place, behind the Conservative Party nominee? It appears that when Nelson A. Rockefeller died in 1979, he took the Republican Party of New York with him.

In Texas, Republican Williams has talked himself out of a solid lead in the race for governor. At first, he offended liberals and feminists with his tasteless remarks about rape and prostitution. No big deal; there aren’t many liberals and feminists in Texas. But last month, Williams went too far. He called his opponent, Democrat Ann Richards, a liar to her face and then refused to shake hands with her. In Texas, cowboys are supposed to behave like gentlemen, not like bullies.

Republicans also talked bravely about winning the governor’s race in Massachusetts. The voters would repudiate the liberal legacy of Dukakis by voting Republican. There was one big problem with this strategy, however. The Democrats did it first. The Democrats nominated John R. Silber, a fierce Dukakis critic and hobgoblin of liberal nightmares. Silber has a kick-ass temperament that fits the mood of the Massachusetts electorate. One voter told a Boston television station that he was voting for Silber because “in your guts, you know he’s nuts.”

In the end, the best the GOP can hope is to limit the damage. The Democrats have a more serious problem, however. They have to figure out what their victory this year means.

In 1982, Democrats ran on the fairness issue and won a big victory. The consequences were disastrous. The 1982 midterm convinced the Democrats to nominate Walter F. Mondale in 1984. Mondale decided that Ronald Reagan’s weakness was the federal budget deficit. And he promised to do what everyone knew had to be done--raise taxes.

Here is how House majority leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) reads the lesson of the 1990 election: “We have begun to redefine the debate from ‘To tax or not to tax?’ to ‘Who pays, and is it fair?’ This gives us a shot at reclaiming large groups of middle-class Americans who haven’t been excited about Democrats for quite some time.”

The “tax the rich” message is working for Democrats this year, but it’s not clear they understand it. The operational definition of “the rich” is “not me.” When voters say, “Tax the rich,” it’s not because they hate the rich. It’s because they hate taxes.

Democrats are running the serious risk of concluding that Americans are reconciled to paying higher taxes. It’s only a question of who pays and how much.

So the joke may be on the Democrats. They could win the 1990 election and lose the interpretation. But after all, what’s a circus without a few jokes? It’s election time. Send in the clowns!