Bringing Home Votes Becomes a Matter of Going Shopping in the Right Markets : Media: With time and resources limited, campaign strategists carefully pitch ads only in those areas likely to deliver results.

This week, democracy has become a game of demographics, maps, designated marketing areas--and making the right choice between Andy Griffith and Bart Simpson.

And then throw in a little espionage and deceit, too.

To campaign for the Super Tuesday elections this week--with primaries in eight states and caucuses in three others--the men who would be President have neither the time nor money to appear in most places or even reach voters with as many ads as they did in the earlier primaries in Georgia, South Dakota and Maryland. And they certainly cannot saturate the airwaves as they did in New Hampshire.

Instead, running for the White House has become a complex game of finding which of 60 television markets across 11 states have more of each candidate’s likely voters, and then sending your candidate out to those places with rhetoric to match the ads. (For the Republicans, there are eight states with races Tuesday.)

“This is a fairly sophisticated series of scenarios, which we have revised four times during this campaign, that gets down to matching congressional districts and TV markets,” said Frank Greer, a media consultant for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

First, a candidate must find out what sort of voters he attracts, using polling data from earlier primaries and elections. Then, overlaying demographic and political maps, the campaigns find the congressional districts in which those voters live. These are then matched with TV markets that serve those areas, until each campaign can decide how most efficiently to reach the highest concentration of people who might be likely to find their candidate attractive.

The targeting is so specific that campaigns even work to pick the right TV shows. Voters who favor Paul E. Tsongas watch “LA Law,” “Murphy Brown” and “Designing Women,” media consultants for various campaigns say, since these shows are watched by women and by those with college educations. Bill Clinton voters watch “The Simpsons” and “Roseanne,” which tend toward viewers with lower incomes and education.

The real battleground for Super Tuesday is during “Golden Girls” on Saturday Night, “Matlock,” starring Andy Griffith on Friday and every night during “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune.” Ratings reveal to campaign aides that these shows are those most heavily viewed by senior citizens, that group of traditionally loyal primary voters who may be up for grabs, particularly in Florida, between Tsongas and Clinton.

Candidates also skip whole areas of the country. Tsongas, for instance, is running ads in only three states and he is focusing on South Florida, an area of transplanted Northerners.

“We are going up in areas where we feel we have a good chance of winning delegates,” said Tsongas spokesman David Eichenbaum.

In Texas, conservative Republican Patrick J. Buchanan is running ads only in San Antonio, Lubbock, Dallas and Amarillo. He is skipping places like President Bush’s home of Houston, and such Democratic or ethnic strongholds as Brownsville or Austin.

With time and money limited, ads are also less important than candidate appearances, either in the flesh or via satellite.

Since people won’t see that many ads, “your commercials are just a grace note to your free media,” meaning news coverage, said Michael D. McCurry, an adviser to the defunct campaign of Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey.

And appearing somewhere may not mean actually campaigning in front of voters or even in public. The airport press conferences of 1988 have given way more this year to doing live interviews via satellite with local anchormen.

Buchanan, for instance, is averaging nearly a dozen satellite interviews a day, usually with anchormen in faraway states where his daily campaign stops can’t get on the local TV news.

Finally, with time so scarce, voters may decide this crucial election Tuesday based on the barest knowledge of the candidates.

“How are you going to position yourself in the race, and who are you trying to talk to?” posed Tsongas media consultant Fred Woods. “If your opponent is cutting into one particular group of your supporters, do you want to respond, or protect another group? Any time you get into a defensive posture it is difficult.”

The Tsongas campaign, for instance, was faced with a crucial decision about what ads to begin airing Friday. Clinton, on the stump in Florida, was suggesting that Tsongas might cut Social Security for the elderly. And in his ads in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, Clinton was accusing Tsongas of supporting Republican “trickle down economics.”

Finally, the campaigns are busy trying to hide from each other what they are doing while playing reconnaissance on their rivals.

For example, when the Clinton campaign found out that former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. had quietly bought four times as much commercial time as they had in the heavily black area of Jackson, Miss., late last week, they were scrambling to decide how to react.

Here is an outline of the decisions the campaigns have made:

TSONGAS: The former Massachusetts senator is running ads in just three of the 11 states--throughout Florida, in major cities of Texas and in Knoxville, Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., all college communities.

He resolved the dilemma of how to counter Clinton with two new ads that began Friday. One begins with a quotation from New York magazine of Clinton saying: “I desperately want to be your President.” Over that image, an announcer, says: “Some people will say anything to be elected President. Now Bill Clinton is distorting Paul Tsongas’ record on Social Security trying to scare people.”

Continuing, the announcer says: “But Bill Clinton knows for 10 years in the Congress, Paul Tsongas fought to protect Social Security, to extend Medicare coverage and end age discrimination. Isn’t it time we sent a message that we’ve had enough negative campaigning?”

In a second ad, Tsongas trumpets his record and endorsements on the environment. Both ads are running in Florida. In Texas, Tsongas is running his biographical ad that shows him swimming.

CLINTON: The Arkansas governor is running TV commercials in 42 of Super Tuesday’s 60 media markets. In most of those states, he is running two ads, one that defines him as caring about old-fashioned values and another describing Tsongas as a Republican in Democratic clothing.

In the first, Clinton is talking with a roomful of people about how in the 1980s the nation lost sight of the “values we were raised with . . . work and family and faith.”

An announcer then says, “Bill Clinton will put people first again: sweeping education reform, job training, moving people from welfare to work, demanding corporate responsibility.”

Finally, Clinton is again talking to voters with an implicit reference to Tsongas’ emphasis on job growth: “We do need more incentives for business. But they should be targeted for people who’ll create jobs and opportunity in America. No more something-for-nothing for anybody.”

BROWN: This grass-roots campaign has generally relied on cable television, usually running a 30-minute fund-raising “infomercial,” and on getting news coverage, particularly by doing radio call-in programs. Since advertising may play less of a role this Tuesday, and given Brown’s new status after his victory in Colorado last Tuesday, Brown may have more success with this from now on.

But the Clinton campaign is concerned by reports that Brown is running ads in some black areas of the South, trying to capitalize on support from the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Brown’s experience working with minorities and Mother Teresa. The Brown campaign would not confirm where else in the South, if any, it had ads on the air.

BUCHANAN: The former television commentator is mainly running two commercials that he used successfully in New Hampshire. Both attack Bush for breaking his no-new-taxes pledge, and one assails Bush’s failure to include his tax break for the middle class in the proposal he sent to Congress, despite his vow to do so in his State of the Union address.

People have “forgotten how explicit Bush was on the issue of taxes and we need to remind him of his deceit,” Buchanan political coordinator Paul Erickson said.

In addition to the selected cities in Texas, Buchanan is on the air in targeted parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

But the Buchanan campaign has chosen to restrict its use of two attack ads first used for Georgia’s primary last week, one criticizing Bush for signing the civil rights bill, and another attacking Bush--erroneously--for funding, through the National Endowment for the Arts, some kinds of art Buchanan has called perverted. Those two ads are running only in parts of the South, and mostly on cable, where the audience can be even more narrowly targeted.

BUSH: The Bush campaign is on the air in just four of the eight states holding Republican primaries Tuesday--Massachusetts, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana. In most, he is running two ads, one describing the Bush agenda for the economy, and the other a direct attempt to define Buchanan as a candidate who has said negative things about women, who has produced misleading ads and is an isolationist who is “wrong for America.”

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this story.