Presidential Hopefuls Woo Conservative Voter Networks : Politics: Among the groups being courted by the GOPs are gun owners and right-wing Christians. But such tactics by either party pose risks.

When Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas began assembling his 1996 presidential campaign organization in New Hampshire, one of the first people he signed up was a Concord lawyer named Al Rubega.

Rubega is not a prominent party leader. He doesn’t hold an elected office, and he isn’t an accomplished fund-raiser. But he is the president of Gun Owners of New Hampshire, and a board member of the National Rifle Assn.--perhaps the best organized conservative group in the state. “They get out and work like crazy,” said Mike Dennehy, Gramm’s New Hampshire state coordinator. “I would rank them as probably the biggest network in the state.”

Tapping into such established networks of conservative voters ranks near the top of the early priority list for candidates bidding for the 1996 GOP presidential nomination.

In this shadowy first stage of the contest, while much of the public is blissfully unaware that the race has even begun, Republican candidates are engaged in what amounts to a nationwide exercise in choosing up sides.

Rather than trying to reach the broad public--except with their announcement events--the candidates are now mostly casting their appeals narrowly to elected officials, money collectors and interest groups with the potential to reach large numbers of conservative voters.

“We are spending a significant amount of our time meeting with the leadership and activists in a broad range of coalition groups,” said Guy Rodgers, the campaign manager for conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan.

In Democratic politics, organizing interest-group support involves courting labor unions, environmentalists, civil rights groups and feminists. For Republicans, the top targets are gun owners and conservative Christians, followed by anti-tax groups, right-to-work proponents, supporters of term limits and Ross Perot and the emerging “wise use” and property-rights movements across the West. On both sides the stakes are the same: access to on-the-ground political networks with the potential to get significant numbers of voters to the polls.

And on both sides the risks are the same. Just as Democratic presidential candidates have confronted charges of pandering to special interests while maneuvering for the nomination, the Republican candidates could face general election turbulence over gestures like the recent promise by Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) to the NRA that he will seek to overturn the ban on 19 types of semiautomatic assault weapons that was approved last year.

“I think they have potentially set themselves up for enormous problems,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, President Clinton’s pollster. “The assault-weapon debate . . . worked against the Democrats in this last election because it was seen, for those people who cared about the issue, as intrusive government. I think the assault-weapon debate (in 1996) is going to be about NRA power and the Republicans paying off to the special interests.”

In both parties, the capacity of organized interest groups to deliver votes has undeniably eroded. “The idea of a person or a group controlling votes is an outdated idea,” said Roger J. Stone, the chief strategist for Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who announced his candidacy late last month. “We live in the era of mass communications.”

But constituency groups can still provide the candidates with an identified pool of voters linked by common interests and a ready source of the activists who “are willing to go door to door, to lick the envelopes and to make the phone calls,” as Rodgers put it. Those can be critical assets--especially because key primaries and caucuses like New Hampshire can be won with just a few tens of thousands of votes. The interest groups “are marginally useful,” said Stone, “but this is a game of margins.”

No one who attended a two-day NRA conference in Washington last week would have any doubt about the priority that leading candidates place on support from the 3.5-million-member group. On Monday, the featured speaker was Dole. On Tuesday, it was Gramm.

Gramm unwaveringly denounced gun control. Dole told the group: “I’ve said, and I think it’s a fact, don’t worry about any more gun-control laws while the Republicans control the Congress of the United States. It’s not going to happen.”

The 1.5-million-member Christian Coalition, which was founded by Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson after his unsuccessful 1988 bid for the GOP presidential nomination, has been receiving similarly solicitous attention.

In that competition, Dole has snared some of the top prizes: He’s hired Steve Scheffler, the Christian Coalition’s field director in Iowa and will soon announce the appointment of Judy Haynes, another senior official from the group, as his national deputy political director in charge of organizing support from party coalition groups.

While a few groups will endorse as institutions--the Gun Owners of America, a 125,000-member rival to the NRA, recently tapped Buchanan--officials at the leading groups like the NRA and the Christian Coalition see little percentage in choosing between party leaders like Dole and Gramm, who both largely embrace their positions.

“Why should we pick one U.S. senator over another when we need both their help to get legislation passed?” asked Tanya K. Metaksa, the NRA’s chief lobbyist.

The likelihood that the leading interest groups will not institutionally endorse any candidate--at least at the outset of the race--puts a premium on winning individual endorsements that can send signals to the broader constituencies. “The fight is for the national leadership to be positive or neutral,” said Scott Reed, Dole’s campaign manager. “But the real fight is in the states.”

Rubega is typical of the resources that local activists can bring with their endorsements. Once he signed on with Gramm, he sent out a letter to thousands of gun owners explaining his decision--an endorsement co-signed by the previous president of the Gun Owners of New Hampshire, the current vice president, three past vice presidents and two-thirds of the group’s board of directors.

“Basically he doesn’t let the polls do his thinking for him,” Rubega said of Gramm. “He is a leader; he doesn’t have his finger in the wind.”

As Rubega’s comments suggest, the Republican Party interest groups precisely parallel their Democratic counterparts in another respect: They generally reward the most ardently ideological candidates and punish deviation from party orthodoxy.

Consider Dole and the gun owners. For all his recent efforts to reach out, Dole faces residual suspicion for his support of an earlier version of the so-called Brady bill, which requires a waiting period for handgun purchases.

“There is concern about Dole because some of his votes in the past have been seen as anti-gun,” said Craig Peterson, a board member of the New Hampshire gun owners group. Peterson predicted that most of the 25,000 NRA members in the state who vote in the GOP primary will end up with Buchanan or Gramm.

But even Gramm faces some ideological carping from Larry Pratt, the executive director of the gun owners group that endorsed Buchanan. Pratt criticized Gramm for voting for final passage of the Senate anti-crime bill in 1993, even though it contained the assault-weapons ban that Gramm had earlier voted against.

And Gramm is also finding his purity questioned by religious conservatives angered over recent comments in which he has downplayed his opposition to abortion. Among social conservatives, some said that it is not Gramm who is generating the most discussion, but Buchanan and even Alan Keyes, the passionately anti-abortion African American former State Department official who recently declared his long-shot candidacy.

Given such tendencies toward fractionation, some Republicans believe that the party’s key constituencies may be more effective in making life miserable for the candidates they oppose than in boosting those they support.

Conservative activists said California Gov. Pete Wilson, who supports the assault-weapon ban and legal abortion, can expect gun owners and conservative Christians to spread tacks in his path. And Specter, who hopes to organize support from Republicans in abortion-rights groups, guaranteed a steady diet of conflict with conservative Christians when he criticized their influence in the party in his announcement speech.