Clinton Leading Bush by 15 Points in Nationwide Poll : Survey: The governor’s image has improved, despite sustained GOP attacks, Times Mirror reported. Also, support for the President has softened.

Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton holds a solid 15-point lead over President Bush in a new nationwide poll released Wednesday, and the survey shows that Clinton’s image has improved, despite repeated Republican attacks on his character and credibility.

Demonstrating strength across the demographic spectrum, Clinton captured the support of 53% of those interviewed, compared to 38% for Bush. At the same time, the new poll by Times Mirror Co. found that voters’ image of Bush has deteriorated and that support for him has softened while Clinton’s image and support have firmed up.

The Times Mirror Co. is the owner of the Los Angeles Times and other newspaper, broadcasting and publishing enterprises.

The new findings are ominous for White House strategists. Since polling of presidential races began 56 years ago, a candidate has never been as much as 15 points behind at this stage of the campaign and managed to bounce back to victory.

The Times Mirror poll shows a dramatic shift in Clinton’s favor in voters’ views of the two candidates’ likability. Only 32% said they found Bush personally likable, a drop of 12 percentage points since March. Clinton’s rating during that period increased by 16 percentage points, to 49%.

Ever since the Democratic National Convention in July, when independent Ross Perot announced that he would not be a candidate and Clinton surged in the polls, Bush’s support ratings have been stuck just below 40%.

Doug Bailey, a leading Republican political consultant, said: “That means that 60% of people who know the President very well have decided they don’t want to vote for him. He needs to change their views about him and that’s a tough thing for him to do at this stage.”

The Times Mirror poll suggests that Perot, who has vowed to re-enter the campaign if Bush and Clinton continue to sidestep the issue of runaway federal budget deficits, could still have an impact on the election, especially if voters become disillusioned with the other two candidates. But he probably would be little more than a spoiler.

Before Perot pulled out of the race, about 33% of registered voters had said they supported him. Now, the Times Mirror poll found 28% say they would be fairly likely to vote for Perot if he jumps back into the race, but 40% say they would not vote for him in any circumstance.

Because Perot’s name is expected to be on the ballot in all 50 states, a substantial protest vote for him could affect the outcome in a close race and it probably would go against Clinton. Former Perot supporters who would likely vote for the Texas billionaire if he runs now favor Clinton by a 2-1 margin.

The poll of 1,175 registered voters is the fourth national survey released in recent days to give Clinton a lead in the mid-teens. It was conducted Sept. 10-13 and the results have a possible sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Results of the new survey and of previous Times Mirror polls indicate that since mid-July, the Bush campaign has made no headway in pursuing two goals it considers crucial: It has not convinced voters that conditions in the country will improve and that Bush would bring about needed change if he is reelected. Nor has it convinced voters that Clinton would make major mistakes if he were elected.

The poll also offered evidence that the Bush campaign’s heavy emphasis on “family values,” the central theme of last month’s GOP convention, probably backfired, turning off as many voters as it turned on. In particular, the tactic apparently has eroded Bush’s support among younger voters and better educated people who until recently had given the President more support than other groups.

Despite Clinton’s commanding lead in almost every category of the extensive survey, most voters still consider themselves only moderately enthusiastic supporters of either candidate. Of Clinton’s supporters, 29% see themselves as anti-Bush, while 21% are pro-Clinton. Among Bush backers, 20% are pro-Bush and 16% are anti-Clinton.

Bush’s support has softened in recent weeks, with only 14% of his followers strongly behind him, according to the survey. That is only about as firm as Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’ support was at this time in 1988.

Clinton’s support has hardened--with one-fourth of his backers solidly behind him--and now about as firm as Bush’s support was in September, 1988, when he was headed for an overwhelming victory over Dukakis.

Almost 90% of Democrats and 80% of blacks back Clinton. He holds a 2-1 lead among voters from households with annual incomes below $20,000. He leads by 2-1 margins among big city voters and holds solid leads in suburbs and in non-metropolitan areas.

Clinton also leads Bush among Catholic voters and white male voters, but the President leads among white Protestants and white Southern males.

Bush trails in every region of the country--by 57% to 30% in the West, where he does the poorest, and by 50% to 44% in the South, where he does best and where Bush strategists feel he must win overwhelmingly if he is to be reelected. Clinton leads by 53% to 38% in the Midwest, another crucial battleground, and by 55% to 35% in the East.

Bush, at last month’s GOP convention in Houston, cited President Harry S. Truman’s dramatic come-from-behind victory in 1948 over New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey as the model for his campaign this year. In that election, Truman won only after narrowing Dewey’s early 13-point lead in the Gallup Poll to 8 points by mid-September and 6 points by late September.

In the 1968 election, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey came the closest of any presidential candidate to overcoming a 15-point lead in mid-September, but eventually lost the final popular vote, 43% to 42%, with former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace siphoning off 15%.

The Times Mirror poll found that, unlike four years ago, Bush has been unable to unify his core constituencies. In fact, his campaign seems to have had the opposite effect.

Bush may have shored up his support among conservatives with a social agenda by sounding the “family values” theme, but in the process he appears to have alienated socially moderate, economically conservative Republicans and independents.

Young moderate independents who lean to the GOP and formed strong voting blocks for Bush and President Ronald Reagan before him now favor Clinton by a 48%-37% margin.

While the Bush campaign has established itself as having more traditional family and sexual values than Clinton’s, it also has moved to the right of the average American voter in this area and now finds that pluralities of voters under 50 years of age, college educated voters and voters in the West agree more with Clinton on these issues than they do with Bush.

Voters continue to rate Bush as “the good family man” much more often than they do Clinton--50% to 22%. But since a poll last March, Bush’s standing as the more “intelligent” candidate has shrunk from a margin of 30 points to 4 points--34% to 30%--with the margin of error, a statistical tie.