Election Losses Seen as Blow to Bush Presidency

Republican losses in Tuesday’s elections after heavy campaigning by President Bush have weakened not only the party but his presidency, political analysts said Wednesday.

The Democratic gains of one Senate seat and nine House seats in an already overwhelmingly Democratic Congress will make Bush’s job of governing more difficult during the remainder of his term, political advisers and observers said.

So will the continuing divisions within the President’s own party, especially the anger of conservatives over Bush’s decision to accede to higher taxes as part of the recent deficit-reduction package. Many of them already are attributing the Republican losses to the tax issue and what they describe as the White House’s bungling of budget negotiations with Congress.

“The presidency is in trouble,” said Lyn Nofziger, who served as former President Ronald Reagan’s political director, “not only because of the fact (that) the losses will be placed on the President because he abandoned his pledge not to raise taxes, but because, if we’re heading into a recession, it will be more difficult for him to recoup.”

Nonetheless, most analysts said that, barring a deep recession, Bush has emerged from the elections in relatively good shape to run for reelection.

Although the GOP lost gubernatorial races in the key states of Florida and Texas, Republican candidates won in four other states considered crucial in presidential races: California, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan.

“My presidential election strategy always has been that you can win by carrying California and two of the other three (Midwest) states,” said Robert Teeter, a key Bush political adviser who insisted that Republican candidates “did almost as well as could be expected.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater declared that the history of elections in non-presidential election years shows that this year’s loss of congressional seats by the GOP was not unusual.

“We didn’t do too bad,” Fitzwater said. “The President campaigned in a lot of races. Some we won, some we lost . . . . When the final record of the 1990 elections is written, we believe the Republican Party will be strong and its leadership secure.”

Although the loss of nine Republican seats in the House might not appear unusual for an off-year election, it was significant because the GOP entered the election holding only 176 of 435 seats. Moreover, the divisions within Bush’s own party in the House further dilute his influence there.

No one better personifies the division than Edward J. Rollins, director of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. Right up until the election, Rollins was advising GOP congressional candidates to dissociate themselves from the President during the campaign because of Bush’s reneging on his tax pledge. A number of candidates did just that.

Rollins said Wednesday that Bush will find it difficult to bring back into his political camp those blue-collar Democrats and conservative Republicans who supported him in 1988 but since have defected because of the tax issue.

One of the most bitter losses for Bush occurred in his home state of Texas, where Democrat Ann Richards defeated Clayton W. Williams Jr. in the governor’s race. It was Richards who poked fun at Bush during a keynote address at the 1988 Democratic convention, declaring that he was “born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Bush, known to have been highly incensed over Richards’ barbs, put the full prestige of his presidency into the campaign to defeat her, traveling to Texas last Friday and remaining there to campaign for Williams right up until the election.

Democrats could hardly contain their glee over the losses that Republicans suffered in areas where Bush had campaigned heavily. “He made the Texas race his race,” said former Democratic Party Chairman John C. White, a Texan who is now a Washington consultant. “He didn’t invest that much time in any other state, and Texas clearly rejected him.”

Bush will “have a hard time governing now because nobody will be scared of him going into their district to campaign against them,” White said.

Democratic Party Chairman Ron Brown said that 14 of 18 Republican candidates for whom Bush campaigned heavily lost in Tuesday’s balloting.

“It was a referendum on the leadership of George Bush, and he failed,” Brown said. “He went to the American people, almost begging them to send him more Republicans. What they did was send him more Democrats.”

Brown and other Democrats insisted that the election results show Bush is vulnerable in 1992 and could lose in the electoral-rich states of Florida and Texas, which he carried in 1988. But other analysts pointed out that controlling a statehouse or congressional seats is becoming less and less important in determining the winner of a presidential race.

“Anybody who thinks Bush is going to lose Florida or Texas because they won’t have Republican governors doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Peter Teeley, a longtime Bush adviser. “He won’t, unless the economy really goes bad.”

The fact that the country is on the brink of war in the Persian Gulf and on the brink of a recession at home is an overriding factor in assessing Bush’s reelection chances in the wake of the elections, analysts stressed.

“President Bush is facing some serious challenges in the next two years,” said Richard B. Wirthlin, a Republican pollster who has advised both Bush and Reagan. “There are high political risks in the Middle East, and the economy is dicey. He comes out of the election slightly bruised, but clearly not highly vulnerable. I believe (that) unless there’s a severe recession in ’91 or ‘92, he’ll be in a good position for reelection.”

Polls indicate that GOP candidates would have fared even worse if the election had taken place a couple of weeks earlier, when press coverage was still focused on the budget negotiations and Bush’s attempt to blame Democrats for tax increases that he had accepted as part of the deficit deal.

In the final two weeks of the campaign, coverage focused more heavily on Bush’s attacks on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Administration’s threats to use force if necessary to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.

“If the election had been held 10 days earlier,” Wirthlin said, “we could have had a Republican-George Bush meltdown.”

Wirthlin said that his national polls as of Oct. 22 showed the Democrats with a 14-point edge in voters who identified with their party. A margin that large could have indicated a possible Republican loss of 20 House seats, two or three Senate seats and four or five governorships.

“The last five days were good for Bush and the Republicans,” Wirthlin said. “The President’s job rating went from 50% to 59%, and Democratic Party identification went from a 14-point edge to 4 points the night before the election.”

MORE NATIONAL ELECTION COVERAGE: A20, 22, 24, 25