Angry Voters May Keep Buchanan in Race : Campaign: He has support and money to continue running after N.H. contest. But polls suggest the electorate has yet to take him seriously.

With his angry, swaggering challenge to President Bush, Patrick J. Buchanan has captured the attention of enough disaffected voters and--more important--campaign dollars to virtually ensure his continued presence in the 1992 election process beyond New Hampshire.

But while the former commentator may win the most votes against an incumbent Republican President since 1976, when Ronald Reagan almost defeated then-President Gerald R. Ford here, the broader ideological shift desired by Buchanan appears to have less potential to bear fruit.

Even among his own voters, polls suggest, Buchanan’s candidacy is as yet not being taken seriously on its own merits. Rather, most of his support seems to be coming from voters who want to signal their ire at Bush.

Buchanan’s positioning as a spoiler suggests that he will not have the sort of lasting, Reaganesque impact on the party’s future direction that he desires, many conservatives say.

“His biggest accomplishment, and one he will not exceed, is . . . he managed to do what Bush and his people couldn’t have done on their own--get organized,” said Eddie Mahe, a conservative Republican political consultant. “The Bush campaign today exists because of the pressure Pat Buchanan puts on them.”

As he travels around the state where GOP disaffection with President Bush runs high, Buchanan speaks of a “new conservatism for the future” and contends that Bush represents the party’s past. But more effective than his broad strokes is his narrow attack on pocketbook issues.

Buchanan, who has used Bush’s reversal of the “no new taxes” pledge as a cudgel against the President throughout this campaign, on Thursday accused Bush of going back on promises contained in the recent State of the Union address.

In the nationally televised address, Bush asked Congress to raise the personal tax exemption by $500 per child for every family. That tax break was not contained in the budget package the President sent to Congress.

The Republican challenger accused Bush of a “cynical betrayal” of middle-class taxpayers. “Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address appears to have been a giant political scam to hoodwink New Hampshire voters,” Buchanan charged at a morning press conference.

Beyond saying that he would invoke a hiring and spending freeze, however, Buchanan has yet to make clear just how he would balance the nation’s books.

On Monday, Buchanan said he would determine his defense budget by defining what was “in the national interests of the country”--and said that could require either more or less than the $290 billion now spent on defense.

On Friday, he ruled out cuts in Social Security and noted that any President is powerless to change the amount of interest paid each year to the federal debt. He also has said he would not abandon women and children dependent on aid. Taken together, those items constitute an overwhelming chunk of the budget that Buchanan has pledged to cut.

“So you’re going to have to get the cuts and freezes elsewhere,” he said.

Besides damaging or--he hopes--defeating Bush, Buchanan’s larger aim is to reverse a half-century of Republican ideology that dictated involvement in military and financial affairs overseas. Many of Buchanan’s positions on foreign policy and free trade run counter to the prevailing conservative ideology, which limited the reach of his appeal in 1988 and his potential impact in the future, conservatives say.

Buchanan’s rift with other conservatives was most dramatically demonstrated last Saturday when Reagan, whose name Buchanan invokes constantly in his campaigning, publicly endorsed Bush in a video shown during a conservative dinner here.

Before the dinner, several of the party’s most prominent conservatives gathered to defend Bush and to shower Buchanan with criticism.

Former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, a Bush supporter and a conservative favorite, said Buchanan opposes everything Reagan and most conservatives stand for--free trade and a commitment to use U.S. military forces to assist democracies around the world.

Buchanan has said he would impose strict restrictions on trade into the United States. He also opposed President Bush’s decision to commit U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf after the invasion of Kuwait.