Voters Seem Dissatisfied, Uncertain on Election Eve : Campaigns: Gubernatorial, mayoral posts at stake. No sweeping winds of change gauged in off-year races.

As the clock runs out on the campaigns of 1993, the candidates, the parties and the voters are still looking for a theme.

The highest profile races on Tuesday’s ballot--gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and a razor-edged mayoral race in New York City--are all being driven by the same force that propelled Bill Clinton to the White House last year: a hunger for change. But voters appear unsure which party can be trusted to provide it.

“The backdrop for the election is very clear: There is still enormous dissatisfaction with the status quo and personal insecurity about the way things are going,” says Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who is working for candidates in both Virginia and New Jersey. “But in the face of the discrediting of the George Bush solutions and uncertainty about the Bill Clinton solutions, there is no clear direction from the voters.”

In addition to the three high-profile elections, voters in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Detroit, Boston, Cleveland, Seattle, Miami and other cities will elect mayors Tuesday. Closely watched ballot initiatives include measures on school vouchers in California and taxes in Washington state and Oregon.

Both parties are still trying to puzzle out a political landscape dominated by the presence of a Democrat in the White House after 12 years of Republican control. Judging by the campaigns in the big three elections this year, most observers say, Republicans haven’t made much progress at sharpening a new message for the 1990s. “I don’t see much in the way of a common theme,” says James P. Pinkerton, a former Bush White House aide now at the Manhattan Institute in Washington, D.C., a conservative think tank.

Democratic candidates seem even more disjointed as they struggle to adjust to an era when they can no longer blame local problems on insensitive Republican presidents. On the campaign trail this fall, New York Mayor David N. Dinkins has blamed the city’s problems on Ronald Reagan and Bush so often that he sometimes seems nostalgic for the 1980s. Dinkins and New Jersey Gov. James J. Florio have embraced Clinton, but the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, Mary Sue Terry, has distanced herself.

“What do Democrats say when they have control of everything and the change mood (among the voters) continues?” says Charles Cook, publisher of a political newsletter in Washington. “There’s an absence of foils for Democrats--that’s a real problem.”

Predicting emerging issues from odd-year elections is a hazardous business. After Democrats Florio and L. Douglas Wilder in Virginia won governorships in 1989 by stressing support for abortion rights, pundits predicted that the issue would dominate the 1990 campaigns. It never happened. This year the signals may be even more diffuse--and in that sense accurately reflect the electorate’s enormous ambivalence.

Everywhere, for example, voters are concerned about crime. But it isn’t likely they will signal a strong preference on how they want candidates to respond.

Democrats are pressing gun control measures with new confidence.

In New Jersey, Florio has clearly benefited from stressing his passage of a ban on assault weapons in 1990. Florio has lashed his opponent, Republican Christine Todd Whitman, for criticizing the law and gleefully tied her to the National Rifle Assn. Historically, few politicians have sought to tangle with the powerful NRA, but concern about urban violence has so sharpened that when the NRA bought ads last week criticizing Florio, Whitman took pains to insist she did not welcome the move.

But in the Virginia gubernatorial race, Terry hasn’t benefited much from stressing gun control and tying the NRA around her opponent, Republican George Allen Jr. Although Virginia already has a computerized instant-check system for gun purchases, Terry has proposed a five-day waiting period on handgun purchases--a proposal modeled on the Brady bill that Congress now has under consideration.

Allen opposes the waiting period and instead has proposed to abolish parole for certain types of violent offenses. In a Washington Post survey, Virginia residents were somewhat more enthusiastic about imposing the waiting period on gun purchases than on abolishing parole.

But Allen’s opposition to gun control hasn’t dented his comfortable lead in recent polls over Terry, and most analysts expect him to cruise to victory Tuesday.

On taxes, the potential exists for a similarly mixed message.

In the White House, all eyes are on Florio, who pushed through a $2.8-billion tax increase in 1990 after a campaign in which he said he saw no need for new taxes. After the tax hike, Florio saw his approval ratings skid--much as Clinton did while shouldering his tax plan through Congress last spring.

If Florio wins Tuesday, many Democrats will say it augers well for Clinton’s prospects in 1996. More tangibly, said White House political director Joan Baggett, House and Senate members will be looking toward Florio’s fate as they consider tough votes on financing for Clinton’s health care plan and other issues in 1994.

When Whitman’s campaign stumbled through the summer, Florio raced out to a large advantage. In the past few weeks, she has shifted the focus back onto the governor and narrowed the gap, although polls disagree over how much.

Private GOP polls show the percentage of voters saying Florio should be reelected has dipped below 40%. But two public surveys released Sunday gave him a lead of nine and 10 percentage points. A third poll, from the Asbury Park Press, showed a dead heat, with more than one voter in five undecided.

However New Jersey votes Tuesday, the outcome will have to be blended with the results from three ballot tests in the Pacific Northwest before any conclusions can be drawn about the mood of taxpayers.

In Washington state, two measures are competing to limit the growth in state expenditures, to roll back new taxes approved this year to finance the state’s health care plan and to make it more difficult to raise taxes in the future.

One measure would limit future state spending by a formula tied to inflation and population growth, and require approval by both two-thirds of the Legislature and a majority of voters for any tax increases that exceed the cap.

The second would roll back tobacco and alcohol taxes approved by the Legislature this year to expand health care coverage for the uninsured in the state. It would also limit future state revenues to a fixed percentage of state personal income.

Voting is expected to be close on both measures, recent surveys show. If the state repeals the taxes approved to help subsidize health care for the uninsured, it might cast a shadow over Clinton’s efforts to pass tobacco taxes to fund his health care plan. And if the state mandates that future tax boosts receive voter approval, it would further energize efforts to place similar measures on the ballot next year in more than half a dozen states.

“The next wave in the tax revolt is voter approval for taxes,” says David Keating, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union.

In an Oregon election on Nov. 9, a coalition of citizen and public employee unions are trying for the ninth time in six decades to pass a state sales tax.

The Oregon measure may fare better than previous sales tax initiatives but is unlikely to prevail, largely because of continued “belief in government waste and inefficiency,” says Tim Hibbitts, a Portland-based independent pollster.

The continued grass-roots strength of the anti-tax movement is a sign that Democrats still face an uphill climb in persuading Americans to embrace a more activist government. But Republicans may not be able to find much evidence Tuesday of greater enthusiasm for their “market-based” solutions to domestic problems.

Conservatives are bracing for a decisive rejection in California of private school vouchers--an idea that many have hoped will be a centerpiece of GOP domestic policy during the 1990s. Just as revealingly, in New York, Dinkins’ opponent, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has called the idea divisive and refused to endorse it. His decision, after Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s disavowal of vouchers, raises doubts about the future of the idea in the big cities, where all agree that school reform is most urgent.

In the absence of grand themes or sweeping currents, political observers say this has been a year more about execution than inspiration. Well-run campaigns have given Florio, Allen and even Dinkins better prospects for victory than seemed imaginable only six months ago.

Poor campaigns have hobbled Whitman and Terry and left Giuliani in a close race dominated by racial divisions. The gubernatorial campaigns in New Jersey and Virginia may also stand as further evidence that female candidates still face some voter resistance for executive, as opposed to legislative, positions.

And all of these races are reminding officeholders that voters are still as skeptical and sour about politicians as they were last year. In recent focus groups, says GOP pollster Frank Luntz, even the promise of change--the silver bullet in 1992--now evokes weary shrugs.

“They thought they were going to get change with Bill Clinton, and they are very disappointed with the change they have gotten,” says Luntz, who is working for Giuliani. “The word change has become status quo.”