Florida Is Huge, Diverse Battlefield for Democrats

For more than 1 million voters in this diverse and distracted state, decision day in the 1992 presidential race has arrived--long before many people even noticed it approaching.

For the Democratic candidates, today’s Florida primary looms as the pivotal event of Super Tuesday, when 11 states hold primaries or caucuses and 783 delegates are at stake. It is the one Southern state that has drawn serious efforts from Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas. But even on the eve of the election, support for any of the candidates is extraordinarily thin.

The 1992 campaign is skittering through Florida like a thunderstorm--loud, fleeting and turbulent. Almost daily for the last week, squalls of rancor have erupted among Clinton, Tsongas and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. on such issues as Israel, Social Security and the gasoline tax. On television stations across the state, Clinton ads criticizing Tsongas--and vice versa--are inescapable.

Brown, however, purchased only a few ads on local cable TV stations, and he bought no broadcast time in the final days of the campaign.

It is not clear how much of an impression any of this has made on voters in a state where local candidates usually spend months and millions of dollars just getting past the front porch. As the Democratic contenders are learning, trying to get a grip on Florida in two weeks is like trying to throw your arms around the world.

“There is still a very strong sense that we have to learn more about these guys,” said Miami-based pollster Robert Joffee of Mason-Dixon Opinion Research Corp. “And there is a discomfort that we have to make a decision without having enough information.”

In the Republican race, conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan took a look at the problem and threw up his hands. After an early foray, he has essentially written off the state to focus on the Deep South. With former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke not on the ballot, analysts expect Buchanan to get about the one-third protest vote he has received elsewhere.

But for the Democrats, Florida’s primary--with its prize of 148 delegates, second only to Texas--has unavoidably “become the battleground” on Super Tuesday, as New York Rep. Stephen J. Solarz, a Clinton supporter, told a North Miami Beach crowd Sunday morning. Tsongas has mounted little more than a token effort in Texas, where Clinton leads in the polls.

Tsongas dropped plans to campaign in two other Super Tuesday states Monday, electing to stay in Florida because he believes he has tightened the race in the state. Clinton also spent Monday in Florida. And, in what may be a sign of how insiders are handicapping the race, Clinton received a last-minute endorsement from state party Chairman Simon Ferro.

“I think we have an excellent chance of putting the nomination away in the next 30 days if we all close ranks,” Ferro said in Sunrise, Fla.

Florida has been thrust into a critical role for two reasons. Both campaigns agree that the state, with its burgeoning population of college-educated suburbanites, offers Tsongas his best chance to avoid a Clinton Southern sweep today. Seven of the 11 contests are in Southern or border states.

And, almost as important, Florida’s huge, varied population presents the candidates with the most complex political test they have yet faced. “Florida is not a single state,” said Democratic Lt. Gov. Buddy McKay. “You could do better to think of Florida as a region.”

The candidates face a Florida electorate that includes, among other things, substantial populations of blacks and Latinos; Jewish retirees from the Northeast, who line the condominium corridors of North Miami Beach; young suburbanites who live outside eight separate media markets, and conservative rural northern Florida voters, who feel more affinity for the backwoods of Georgia than the pink stucco of Miami Beach.

With that kaleidoscopic makeup, Florida’s results could preview the large and diverse battlegrounds looming in the Northeast and Midwest over the next month, argues Frank Greer, Clinton’s media adviser.

“I think the outcome in Florida is going to be a clear bellwether of how the country is going to go on Paul Tsongas or Bill Clinton,” Greer said.

Tsongas aides dismiss that interpretation, insisting that Clinton still holds substantial regional, organizational and financial advantages in today’s vote. But Florida has favored cerebral, suburban-oriented candidates like Tsongas before: Gary Hart swept to victory in the state in 1984, as did Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis four years later. In fact, since 1976, the New Hampshire winner in both parties has gone on to take Florida.

As in other recent contests, Brown has found a base of support among students, environmentalists and activist groups. But he has lacked the funds to make an impression on large numbers of voters in this media-driven state.

Florida has clearly emerged this last week as the principal stage for the evolving national debate between Tsongas and Clinton--the two top contenders in polls in the state--with Brown buzzing around the edges with his message of a pox on both their houses.

On Monday, Brown was campaigning in New England, where he lashed out at Clinton and the entire political Establishment, which Brown blames for many of the nation’s problems.

“We’re here to give you a voice,” Brown told a friendly lunchtime crowd in Providence, R. I. He described his campaign as standing for people alienated from politics as usual, and he railed against the greed that he said is “turning the planet into a stinking junkyard.”

Crisscrossing Florida over the last week, Clinton and Tsongas have been not so much debating each other as competing to define the election on different terms. In his speeches and TV ads, Clinton is portraying himself as a populist who will “put people first.” By contrast, he paints Tsongas as an elitist who will sacrifice economic fairness to growth, raise the regressive gas tax and cut cost-of-living adjustments for entitlement programs, such as Social Security.

In his TV ads and appearances, Tsongas is trying to frame the election as a choice not between a populist and an elitist, but between a slick politician and an anti-politician. His new TV ad criticizes Clinton as a man “who will say anything to get elected President,” even if that means distorting Tsongas’ record. At every appearance, Tsongas offers himself as the opposite: a truth-teller espousing what is not politically popular.

Within reasonable bounds, at least: In a state with so many elderly voters, Tsongas has quickly moved to defuse Clinton’s charge that he wants to cut cost-of-living adjustments on Social Security--an idea that the former senator wrote about favorably in his campaign manifesto, “A Call to Economic Arms.”

Last weekend, Tsongas said he would only consider reducing inflation adjustments for senior citizens earning $125,000 or more a year--and even that only in “three or four years from now if I have not gotten a handle on the deficit.” At the same time, Tsongas distributed information showing that in 1986, Clinton supported a freeze on such inflation adjustments as part of an overall budget deal.

When Tsongas told a North Miami Beach group last Saturday that such affluent seniors may have to take cuts “so there is some money available for . . . children,” he was rewarded with applause. But, with no recent public polling available, it is not clear whether that represents a majority view--or whether, as Clinton aides believe, the issue is hurting Tsongas among seniors.

Also unclear is whether efforts by Clinton supporters to raise doubts about Tsongas’ views on Israel is concerning older Jewish voters.

Allegations center on the former senator’s criticism of the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor and his opposition to the use of force against Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War. Tsongas insists that he criticized the 1981 raid only because it endangered Israeli foreign aid in Congress.

Overall, Joffee says recent history favors Tsongas: In the 1984 presidential primary, and more recent Democratic gubernatorial and Senate primaries, the candidate with the most appeal to suburban, college-educated professionals surged to victory in the end.

“If Tsongas is locking up that vote, as he appears to be doing, he has a good shot,” Joffee said

Others note that Dukakis and Hart each received only about 40% of the total vote in Florida, and they wonder if Tsongas can pull down more. That was enough to win when the Rev. Jesse Jackson siphoned off the black vote, but if Clinton can marry black support to his blue-collar and rural base, as he did in Georgia and South Carolina, Tsongas could be squeezed in an increasingly familiar demographic vise.

The Lineup for Super Tuesday

Primaries

Delegates at stake:

Democrats GOP Texas 196 121 Florida 148 97 Massachusetts 94 38 Tennessee 68 45 Louisiana 60 38 Oklahoma 45 34 Mississippi 39 32 Rhode Island 22 15

Caucuses

Democrats GOP Missouri 77 -- Hawaii 20 -- Delaware 14 --

Republican caucuses in Missouri, Hawaii and Delaware will be held later.