GOP Scrambles to Shore Up Sinking Support

The Republican Party, its back against the wall, is groping for a way to buck the tide of voter discontent that threatens to end the era of GOP resurgence that began with Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election.

Some Republicans put the blame for this peril squarely on their party’s leader, President Bush. “His record is a total damned disaster over the last four years,” says party consultant Eddie Mahe.

But the GOP’s problems appear far more complex, and their solution may well require an overhaul of the party’s traditional formulas, now that the Cold War has ended and economic growth has slowed to a crawl. The threat from the Soviet Union was a unifying issue for Republicans for almost half a century, and the booming economy of the Reagan years helped the party attract new recruits.

“Right now you have an election where the issues that went the Republican way in the past are gone from the scene,” says Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., who led the party during the Reagan presidency.

With the issue of anti-communism neutralized, Republicans were left mainly to rely on what Fahrenkopf calls “that old standby, that Republicans will cut taxes and spending while Democrats will tax and spend.”

But, adds Fahrenkopf, “when George Bush took back his pledge to the American people of ‘Read my lips, no new taxes,’ to all intents and purposes that bedrock issue went out with him.”

In all, the party is facing a grim array: declining influence in state legislatures and the Congress, fewer voters identifying with the party and possibly a crisis of faith.

“People have disconnected themselves from conservatism,” says conservative activist Paul M. Weyrich, “because they associate conservatism with Republicans and Republicans with George Bush.”

Perhaps even more fundamental, some critics say the Republicans failed to meet a major challenge during their 12-year stand in the White House, largely because of their inherent suspicion of government. That challenge was the creation of an alternative approach to the Democratic reliance on government to respond to the day-in-day-out needs and aspirations of the citizenry.

Polling data indicates that voters are now most concerned about issues centered on the problems of employment, education and health care. “These are issues voters believe that Democrats have tried to do something about, and on which they are perceived as better performers,” says UCLA political scientist John Petrocik.

“The Republican Party prospers in part because of the times when Democrats fail to do well with their issues and something else pushes them off the stage,” says Petrocik, himself a Republican who was a consultant to the 1988 Bush campaign. “We are an alternative when the first choice doesn’t work.”

Bush’s defenders claim that the President has sought to promote a pragmatic agenda aimed at meeting grass-roots concerns. They cite proposals ranging from a capital gains tax cut aimed at spurring the economy to tax credits to help meet the costs of health insurance.

Republicans still can make a claim to be ready to campaign vigorously on the so-called value issues--those relating to social mores and personal behavior. But given the nation’s prolonged economic difficulties, such issues appear to have lost much of their arresting nature. It is unclear, for example, that the Republican Party’s rigid opposition to abortion will result in anything more than an even break, considering the sharp divisions among the electorate on this question.

Further hindering Republicans has been their failure to achieve a political realignment that would have established the GOP as the majority party.

At the state level, where voters tend to put a premium on the problem-solving ability of politicians, Republicans have lost ground. They now control 20 governorships, three fewer than in 1981, when Reagan began his first term in the White House. And they have full control of only nine state legislatures, compared with 15 in 1981.

On Capitol Hill, the Republicans controlled the Senate with 53 seats when Reagan entered the White House. Now the GOP has only 43. On the House side, the Democratic majority has swollen from 50 seats to more than 100.

The most significant GOP gains came in party identification--the percentage of voters who view themselves as Republicans, regardless of their actual registration. In 1980, before Reagan won the White House, Democrats had a 22% advantage over Republicans in party identification, according to Gallup opinion surveys. But in 1985, aided by Reagan’s personal popularity and his 1984 landslide reelection, the margin narrowed to five percentage points.

But that was as close as the Republicans have come to catching up with the Democrats. In fact, they have since lost a little ground. By 1991, the Gallup survey showed the gap had widened to nine points. In the Los Angeles Times Poll conducted late last week, the Democrats had an 11-point edge.

Especially agonizing to GOP stalwarts is that less than a year ago, the party--coasting on the momentum from Bush’s Gulf War triumph--seemed to be on top of the political heap. With Bush’s approval ratings at honeymoon levels, a sketch on the “Saturday Night Live” television show satirized the eagerness of prominent Democrats to find excuses for not challenging him in 1992.

Not only were Republicans supremely confident of Bush’s reelection, they were also already counting seats they expected to gain in the House and Senate, aided by Bush’s coattails, reapportionment and the mounting public disgust with the Democratic-controlled Congress.

But as the 1992 fall campaign approaches, gloom hangs over Republican prospects across the board. A battery of polls shows Bush trailing Democratic standard-bearer Bill Clinton by 20 percentage points or more; the new Times Poll puts the margin at 23 percentage points. In congressional competition, meanwhile, Republican pollster William McInturff reports recording a six percentage point drop in generic support for Republican candidates in less than two months, giving Democrats a 49% to 32% advantage nationally.

In April of 1991, McInturff found support for the two parties even.

As they readied for their convention, GOP platform drafters sought to wring the maximum benefit from their party’s past achievements. “Contrary to statist Democratic propaganda,” their preamble reads, “the American people know that the 1980s were a rising tide, a magnificent decade for freedom and entrepreneurial activity.”

But while the economic tide was rising for at least some Americans during the eight years Reagan was in power, economic statistics show that it began to ebb when Bush took over in 1989. Through the first quarter of 1992, economic growth during Bush’s tenure in the White House has been a mere 2.5%, compared with the 14% average growth of gross domestic product during the Reagan years. The figure for the Bush years is the lowest mark by far of any post-World War II chief executive.

This extended period of economic drift is having an impact on GOP support, particularly on the young voters who were attracted to Republican ranks by the growth of the Reagan years.

Fahrenkopf notes that starting with the Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, “for 50 years, when young people reached political maturity, about two-thirds went Democrat. One of the changes Reagan wrought was to turn that around.”

But now Fahrenkopf is worried.

“I’m seeing some preliminary polling numbers which indicate that the hold Republicans have had is slipping” on young voters.

GOP pollster McInturff sees the threat from slow growth cutting across the demographic spectrum.

“The Republican coalition is enormously dependent on a good economy to hold it together,” he says. “During the Reagan era, lots of people under 30, particularly men, were attracted to the Republican Party because we had a solid, decent economy, and Republicans were seen as defending our interests abroad.”

In addition to facing the danger that these younger voters will drift away with the economic slowdown, McInturff says Republicans must also worry about older voters, many of them white Southern males who were drawn to the GOP because they perceived the Democrats as “the party of giveaway to special interests.”

Now, McInturff fears that these voters, many of whom came of age right after World War II, will go back to their Democratic roots because “there was one kind of thing they learned early in life, and that is that you don’t vote Republican when times are tough.”

Another, more general reason for the GOP difficulty is simply that they have held the White House for so long. During such a long tenure, as conservative analyst Kevin Phillips has pointed out, voter patience with unkept promises grows short, and incumbent excuses for not meeting expectations grow stale.

Some Republicans, however, feel Bush has made things worse by failing to set goals and pursue them with vigor.

GOP consultant Mahe, who served as executive director of the party when Bush was its chairman in 1973, condemns the President’s record “on spending, on taxes and on regulation, from a conservative perspective, from a Republican perspective and from an American perspective. I can’t figure out how anybody can be enthusiastic about George Bush, up to and including Barbara Bush.”

Convention Events

Here is the tentative schedule of events for the Republican National Convention. The convention meets in daytime and evening sessions on Monday and Tuesday with evening sessions only on Wednesday and Thursday. Times below are listed in Pacific Daylight Time. MONDAY

8 a.m.: Opening ceremonies

* Morning session’s call to order by Richard N. Bond, chairman of the Republican National Committee

* Adoption of platform

5 p.m.: Evening session’s call to order

* National anthem sung by Tanya Tucker

* Opening remarks by Jay Kim, mayor of Diamond Bar, Calif., and candidate for the U.S. House from California’s 41st District

Remarks by:

* Rep. Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan

* Sarah Flores, assistant county supervisor, Los Angeles County

* Senate Minority Whip Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming

* Patrick J. Buchanan

* Paul Laxalt, former U.S. senator from Nevada

* Former President Ronald Reagan

TUESDAY

8 a.m.: Morning session’s call to order

5 p.m.: Evening session’s call to order

Remarks by:

* Education Secretary Lamar Alexander

* Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly

* Gaddi Vasquez, Orange County, Calif., supervisor

* Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp

* House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia

* Keynote address by Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas

WEDNESDAY

5 p.m.: Call to order

* National anthem sung by Wynonna Judd

Remarks by:

* California Gov. Pete Wilson

* Marilyn Quayle

* Barbara Bush

* William J. Bennett, former education secretary and former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy

* Nomination speech for President Bush by Labor Secretary Lynn Martin

* Roll call of states

THURSDAY

5 p.m.: Call to order

Remarks by:

* Former President Gerald R. Ford

* Vice President Dan Quayle’s acceptance speech

* Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas

* President Bush’s acceptance speech

TV COVERAGE

Mon. Tues. Wed. Thurs. CBS 6:30-8 p.m. 7-8 p.m. 7-9:15 p.m. 6-8 p.m. NBC 7-8 p.m. 7-8 p.m. 7-8 p.m. 6:30-8 p.m. ABC 6:30-8 p.m. 7-8 p.m. 7-8 p.m. 6-8 p.m. PBS 5-8 p.m. 5-8 p.m. 5-8 p.m. 5-8 p.m. CNN and Gavel to gavel C-SPAN

Sources: Reuters, RNC