After 9 Months of Digesting Campaigns, Voters Ready to Decide : Election: Some made up their minds early. The others--’persuadables’--have been the prime targets of the campaigns.

For nine months they have watched presidential candidates debate and advertise, argue and attack. They have thought about taxes and trust and change and, above all, the economy. And now, finally, voters have about made up their minds.

For some, the choice has been easy. “I haven’t changed. I’m still strongly pro-Bush,” said Dutch Dreyer, a 74-year-old retired salesman in Carrollton, Ga. “I think he’s done a good job. I think he’s being blamed for the evils of Congress, for their spendthrift ways.”

Others continue to agonize. “I just said to my husband at dinner tonight, ‘I really don’t know what I want to do Tuesday,’ ” said Martha Ouellette, a mother of two in Nashua, N.H., still trying to make up her mind whether to vote for independent Ross Perot or join her husband in supporting Democrat Bill Clinton.

Voters like Dreyer--people who know from early on how they plan to vote--make up the largest share of the electorate. But it is people like Ouellette who give elections their volatility. Those voters--the “persuadables,” in the lingo of campaign consultants--make up the prime targets for all the millions of dollars and thousands of hours that campaigns expend.

Those voters also have been a chief focus for the news media. During this campaign year, Times reporters have interviewed scores of voters across the country, concentrating on the “persuadables” in order to gain insights into how the election looks to the people at the receiving end of all those political messages.

As the year has stretched on, the interviews have shown one marked change: Voter anger about the process, so palpable at first, seems to have subsided. Voters still voice unhappiness about too many negative ads, too much arguing about personalities. But overall, many seem to share the sentiments of Tom Lambelot, a 30-year-old manager at a New Hampshire engineering firm. “The process isn’t perfect,” he said. “But when all the smoke cleared, it worked pretty well.”

In particular, many of the voters interviewed recently cited this year’s wave of talk-show appearances by the candidates as a major improvement in the way campaigns are conducted--a development that gave them much more information about where the candidates stand on the issues of the day.

“The call-in shows have been a big help,” Ouellette said. “You actually hear questions that you might ask. . . . It’s not in-depth, but it gives you an idea” of how the candidates think and what they might do.

The campaigns themselves have found a similar shift in voter attitudes. While many voters still see both Clinton and Bush as flawed candidates, polls show that overall, both men have more favorable ratings than they had in June. Perot’s rating has fluctuated more widely.

“In our focus groups, the change (in voter attitudes) comes through in the degree of interest people have in the election,” Clinton pollster Stanley B. Greenberg said. Earlier in the year, polls showed many potential voters had turned away from politics altogether, saying elections were irrelevant to their lives. Today, by contrast, campaigns find less alienation and more of a sense that the election does matter.

“That’s one of the reasons I think we’ll get a high turnout this year,” Greenberg said. “Perot probably helped that. Even though his message is anti-system and anti-Establishment, he has also helped voters say, ‘Big issues are under discussion, people are talking about important things.’ ”

The most important of those “important things” has, of course, been the economy. In the beginning as in the end, that one issue has dominated the contest. Few voters talk much about issues such as race, abortion or family values--questions that many analysts had expected would dominate the contest. And for all its importance, foreign policy and national security seem to have played little role in this first post-Cold War election.

In the winter, as snow fell in New Hampshire, the primacy of the economy became apparent as the Ouellettes, Martha and Glen, talked of how economic change was tearing them away from their Republican moorings, making them think about voting Democratic.

In March of 1991, Glen Ouellette lost his job with a high-technology firm in Massachusetts. By the time his state’s first-in-the-nation primary rolled around in February, he had been out of steady work for nearly a year. Not long after the primary, he found a full-time job, but one that pays far less than he had made before.

“It’s a small company, but it seems to be catching on. I hope to grow with it,” he said, voicing the optimism about the future that has so long been a part of the American character.

But his recent experiences have tempered that optimistic view. “I don’t see our standard of living going back to where it was a couple of years ago,” he said, “but we’re holding our own.”

Until this year, Ouellette had voted for Republicans. His brush with economic disaster made him begin to change his mind. “This economy is not going to heal itself,” he said. “It’s going to take some investment and some work.”

But it took repeated disappointments from Bush to finally seal Ouellette’s vote. “I kept waiting for him to come around,” Ouellette said. “It sounded for a while like he was going to. But it was always, ‘OK, we’ve got serious problems,’ and then I kept waiting for the next sentence. He never said what he would do about them.”

Jim and Lucia LeVan also felt disappointment with Bush. But in the spring, as the first robins began appearing on the small and tidy front lawns of their middle-class neighborhood in Allentown, Pa., they shared their worries that Clinton lacked the experience for the job.

Five months later, the campaign has only deepened their worries about the Arkansas governor. As they talk about him, their words echo many of the attacks that Bush’s campaign has leveled against him. And in their case, the attacks have succeeded. They will stay with the GOP.

“I will vote for Bush,” Lucia LeVan said. “As the campaign progressed, it became easier because I didn’t like the other choices.

“There are some areas that I’m still not happy about with Bush,” she added. “But I just see us going back to the Jimmy Carter years if we get Clinton.”

Her husband voices similar thoughts. “I don’t know that I’m totally happy with Bush either,” he said. “But Clinton’s flip-flopping--it doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who should be running the country.”

The emphasis on character has made the campaign too negative, he said. “I’m not happy with that approach. But, yeah, I’m influenced by it. Therein lies the problem.”

As for Perot, he never had much appeal for the Pennsylvania couple. “He’s just got no experience as an elected official,” Jim LeVan said.

That’s the point, would be Mike Baer’s response. In late summer, Baer and his wife, Lynn, a suburban couple living outside Dayton, Ohio, voiced disgust with the political process and mourned Perot’s departure from the race.

With Perot back in, they intend to stick with him.

“I was starting to lean toward Bush,” Baer said, “but I wasn’t happy with it.” Perot “seems to be more intent on fixing the economy than crapping around the way the others are,” he said.

Baer concedes that Perot “sort of hurt himself” with his allegations last weekend about Republican dirty tricks aimed at one of his daughters and her August wedding. “Some people think he may be a little paranoid,” he said. “I was a little disappointed he brought it up.”

But to Baer’s mind, Perot is the only candidate willing to make the changes the economy needs, and everything else is secondary. “A lot of people, when they walk into the voting booth, will say, ‘The heck with it. We’ve had Democrats. We’ve had Republicans. And nothing really good has happened,’ ” he said. “They’re liable to give Perot a shot.”

In any case, “he may not win,” Baer said. “But I’m going to vote for him.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in New Jersey.

President Bush campaigns in La Crosse, Wis., Auburn Hills, Mich., Newark and Madison, N.J., and Bridgeport, Conn.

Ross Perot campaigns in Long Beach and Santa Clara. In Long Beach, he is scheduled to speak at 2 p.m. at the city’s convention center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd.

TELEVISION

Perot airs a 30-minute commercial on ABC at 7 p.m. PST and a 60-minute program on NBC at 7 p.m. PST.

Bush and Perot are guests on MTV’s “Choose or Lose: The Home Stretch” at 6:30 p.m. PST.

Bush is a guest on CNN’s “Newsmaker Sunday” at 7:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. PST.

C-SPAN airs live coverage of Perot’s campaign rally in Long Beach at 2 p.m. PST.

C-SPAN airs live coverage of Clinton’s rally at the Meadowlands in New Jersey at 4 p.m. PST.