Economy Has N.H. Voters Looking to the Democrats : Election: Traditional party affiliations mean little in state in distress. Support for Bush appears to be waning.

Ever since she began to vote, Martha Ouellette has had a fairly clear sense of where the two major parties stood.

“The Democratic Party tends to lean more toward the very poor, and everything is for them,” she says. Republicans “go toward the higher class,” but at least they “do some things for the middle,” she adds.

And thinking that way, the 36-year-old mother of two had no trouble deciding whom to support for President four years ago: “I was gung-ho for Bush.”

But life has changed. All about this southern New Hampshire city--and in families like the Ouellettes’--economic trouble has left its mark.

Martha’s husband, 42-year-old Glenn Ouellette, was laid off from his job 10 months ago as an engineer at a computer firm across the border in Massachusetts. Now, for the first time in many years, the Ouellettes--both registered as independents and thus eligible to vote in either party’s presidential primary in New Hampshire--just might think about a Democrat.

In 1988, George Bush carried New Hampshire in the general election by almost 2 to 1 over Democrat Michael S. Dukakis. Only three states gave Bush a larger margin. This year, if the attitudes of voters interviewed in recent days are any indication, Bush’s support here has begun to melt like a snowdrift in the first spring rain. And couples like the Ouellettes are a big part of the reason.

Out of some two dozen voters interviewed, only two volunteered that they were still strong Bush supporters--and one of those was a resident of Connecticut in New Hampshire to visit relatives.

The interviews indicate that because of the economy, Democrats have an opportunity--not a sure thing by any means, but an opening--to reach many long-alienated voters here in a state no Democratic presidential candidate has carried since Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide in 1964.

The opportunity can be seen in statistics.

The average sale price for houses in Nashua, which until recently had the highest average home price in the state, has fallen 26% in the last two years--from $172,000 in 1989 to $127,000 as of 1991’s third quarter.

Statewide, some 150,000 families are behind in their mortgage payments--this in a state with just over 1.1 million residents.

Since the last presidential election, the unemployment rate has almost tripled, the number of personal bankruptcies has soared six-fold and the state has lost 10% of its jobs.

“I don’t see it getting any better soon,” Martha Ouellette says.

One bright spot for Bush is that few of those recently interviewed have settled on an alternative. Many could be won back, particularly if the economy improves.

Nashua probably is not the image that New Hampshire conjures up in the minds of most residents of other parts of the country. Rather than picturesque white churches set against New England town greens, the scene here is of comfortable suburban sprawl.

In the 1980s, the city and surrounding towns boomed as tens of thousands of well-paid workers and high-tech businesses fled across the nearby border from Massachusetts seeking cheaper housing and lower taxes.

Now, with the good times gone, voters are re-examining long-held certainties. And their priorities are clear.

Talk to people long enough and they eventually will raise issues such as health care, abortion, child care, the environment. Foreign affairs, which Bush strategists once viewed as the President’s ace card, now rank far down the list.

But all these matters must wait in line behind the No. 1 concern: the economy.

“We’ve focused enough on the international arena,” says Thomas A. Lambalot, a 29-year-old executive at a high-technology company near here. “The time has come to focus internally.”

Consistently, those interviewed said that in the midst of hard times, they want to hear specifics about how candidates are proposing to turn the economy around.

“What I want to hear the candidates talking about is what’s their plan for getting the economy working,” says Lambalot.

“I don’t care which party a candidate is in,” Glenn Ouellette says. “I want to see someone with a plan.”

That message, picked up last fall by campaign strategists, has strongly influenced the approaches taken by presidential hopefuls. Democrats almost uniformly have eschewed the biographical ads that candidates usually air early in their campaigns, focusing instead on buying time to tout their positions on issues.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, for example, has made his booklet “A Plan for America’s Future” the centerpiece of his campaign. And former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas has passed out thousands of copies of his plan, an 86-page tome chock-full of items such as a call for “a systematic analysis of existing federal tax laws (such as the various depletion allowances).”

But so far, with the campaign having gotten a late start, it seems the candidates’ messages have yet to sink deeply into the minds of potential voters.

A few are attracted to conservative GOP challenger Patrick J. Buchanan. One of those is 59-year-old Maurice Paquette, a retired Army National Guard officer who says he worries the country is “heading into a welfare society.”

Paquette and his wife, Lea, have one credit card. A few years ago the bank wanted to revoke it because they never used it. Now, they try to use it every few months just so they will have it for emergencies. “People are living in deficit,” spending beyond the nation’s means, Paquette says.

He plans to vote for Buchanan, he says, because he is “more conservative.” Bush, he adds, “let us down.”

Many more potential voters are like Lambalot and Joseph J. Porcello, a hospital administrator, both of whom are considering the Democratic field.

Catholic, ethnic and from a working-class background, Porcello is the sort of voter who typifies New Hampshire Democrats. But although he retains his Democratic registration--and thus is eligible to vote only in that party’s primary--in recent general elections he and his wife, Catherine, a registered independent, voted for Republicans for President.

“It’s time to go the other way,” he says.

Porcello and his wife, a nurse, are both working. “We’re among the fortunate ones,” he says. But like nearly everyone in the state, they know someone in trouble. In this case, it is his brother, an accountant in Boston, who has been out of work now for nearly a year.

“We’ve had the Republicans in power the last 10 years,” he says. “It’s time for the pendulum to swing back.”

Lambalot, one of five children of a determined union man, had strayed from his political roots to become “a staunch Republican.” As a young, middle-class, white male, he is the very model of the sort of new voters the party has been recruiting in the last decade.

But hard times have shaken his faith. “I’m starting to question (the GOP) now,” he says.

BACKGROUND

Nashua, New Hampshire’s second largest city, was the state’s quintessential boom town in the 1980s. Its population grew from 67,865 in 1980 to 79,662 in 1990, a 17% increase. Per capita annual income rose 98%, from $7,844 in 1979 to $15,544 in 1987 (the latest year for which such data is available). In the current recession, the city’s prosperity has faded.