ELECTIONS ’92 : THE TIMES POLL : Bush Leads Clinton in Orange County, but Margin Is Perilous : Campaign: President’s current edge in the Southern California GOP bastion would not be enough to assure his carrying the state.

President Bush is leading Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in California’s Republican bastion of Orange County, but by a margin so narrow that his statewide campaign remains in trouble, a Los Angeles Times Poll has found.

Bush leads Clinton in Orange County, 49% to 42%--even though Republicans hold a 20-percentage-point lead in registration over Democrats in the county, 54% to 34%.

The poll of Orange County voters conducted over the weekend produced almost the reverse of a nationwide Times Poll conducted immediately after the Republican National Convention, which found Clinton leading, 49% to 41%.

As a rule, Republican statewide candidates look to Orange County for a winning margin of at least 200,000 votes to offset Democratic strongholds in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. In 1988, Bush carried Orange County, 68% to 31%, or 300,000 votes, when he defeated Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in California, 51% to 47%.

The poll also found that Clinton has pulled his party together in the county after it had splintered during the last decade with a fraction supporting GOP presidential candidates. Among registered Democrats, Clinton leads Bush, 3 to 1.

The President is “being hurt by overwhelming pessimism in the economy and what appears to be lackluster support from the moderate members of his own party,” said John Brennan, director of The Times Poll. “I think he faces a daunting task.”

The poll contacted 1,067 voters in Orange County on Saturday and Sunday. Its margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The results of the poll were especially bad for Vice President Dan Quayle, who has been the Bush Administration’s champion among the conservative Republican voters who control the county’s politics.

More than half of the county’s voters have an unfavorable opinion of Quayle, including 40% of the respondents from his own party. Quayle’s rating was even lower in Orange County than his counterpart on the Democratic ticket, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore.

Barely a quarter of the respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Gore and almost half of the opinions were favorable.

Despite the high profile of social issues in Orange County campaigns, the survey also found that the struggling economy--not abortion--was the driving force in the electorate. When voters were asked to name the issues they would most like to hear discussed by the candidate, the top three responses were the economy, the deficit and unemployment.

The survey found that most Democrats were returning to the fold. And one of five voters in Bush’s own party said they plan to back the Democratic nominee.

Most of those wayward Republicans, who represent about 11% of the county’s electorate, describe themselves as moderates and nearly half are between the ages of 26 and 44. But beyond ideology, they cited their distress over the struggling economy as the reason to break ranks.

Eight in 10 of Clinton’s Republican supporters said they believe the nation is going in the wrong direction, compared to 51% of other Republicans. More than half also said they are worse off financially than they were four years ago, nearly double the response from GOP voters supporting Bush.

Bush’s struggle to hold together his Republican core in Orange County was evident last week when a prominent group of former supporters announced plans to create a campaign committee for Clinton.

The Arkansas governor also is well aware of his standing in Orange County. In an interview aboard his campaign bus Sunday as it traveled through Upstate New York, Clinton told The Times that he may be trailing Bush in Orange County, but he is not giving up on the area.

“I’m not through with them yet,” he said of Orange County’s voters. “I want to go back and take another run at them. That’s a little project of mine. I like it down there. I like Orange County.”

The Democratic nominee added that if he is down by as much as 10 points in Orange County, “It means I win by 15 in California, probably, something like that.”

Since Bush has been trailing Clinton in polls of California, the Republican campaign has been forced to consider whether it should go all-out to win the state since the money might be better spent somewhere else.

A third of the Orange County Republican respondents who said they support Clinton indicated they might change their minds. But 40% of the group said there is nothing George Bush can offer them to win their support.

Overall, when voters were asked to name the one thing that Bush could do or say that would most encourage them to support his reelection, 30% said nothing. The second most popular response was to offer a plan to improve the economy (14%) followed by jobs (9%).

Times staff writer David Lauter in Little Rock, Ark., contributed to this story.

How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Poll interviewed 1,067 Orange County registered voters by telephone Aug. 22 and 23. Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in the county. Random-digit dialing techniques were used to ensure that both listed and non-listed numbers had an opportunity to be contacted. Results were weighted slightly to conform with census figures for sex, race, age, education and household size. The margin of sampling error for the total sample is plus or minus 4 percentage points. For certain subgroups, the margin of error is somewhat higher. Poll results can also be affected by other factors, such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented.