Florida Poll to Be Crucial Test in GOP Race

By her own account, Hope Lamb is not a normal person. She is a political junkie, and right now she’s in seventh heaven.

Lamb has heard Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s campaign speech so often she can recite his jokes. Last week in Washington, Texas Sen. Phil Gramm kissed her hand and asked for her support.

Now she is waiting to hear from former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who has traveled to this quiet lakeside community about an hour northwest of Orlando on a crystalline autumn morning to woo Lamb and a select group of her fellow Republicans.

“Almost everybody for the last few months has been telling us who the next President is going to be,” Alexander tells Lamb and about two dozen others who have gathered at a hotel. But “you don’t have to accept the conventional wisdom. You have a chance to make the conventional wisdom.”

Welcome to Iowa south.

This fall, Lamb and other Republicans in the nation’s fourth-most populous state are receiving the concierge-level personal attention historically reserved for voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two small states that traditionally open the race for the presidential nomination.

The reason: an elaborate straw poll, dubbed Presidency III, that will attract Lamb and nearly 3,400 other state GOP activists to a state party convention in mid-November. Though the voting won’t determine a single delegate to next year’s national convention, the outcome could shape the Republican presidential race more than any other ballot test between now and the Iowa caucus Feb. 12. As a result, the Nov. 18 contest has temporarily turned Florida into the center of the political universe.

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“It is the most defining political event left in 1995,” Dole said on a recent visit to the state.

Straw polls don’t usually attract this much attention--nor deserve it when they do. But previous Florida straw polls boosted the candidacies of Ronald Reagan in 1979 and George Bush in 1987.

This year, Dole, Gramm and Alexander have all accepted Presidency III as a genuine test of strength, investing substantial resources and campaigning heavily in the state. And straw poll organizers say that if retired Gen. Colin L. Powell decides to enter the GOP race before the vote, they will add his name to the ballot.

The Florida contest appears a more legitimate measure of local sentiment than the summer’s much-publicized straw poll in Iowa, which allowed anyone to vote who paid a fee to the state party. By contrast, delegates to the Florida vote were mostly chosen by lottery from a pool of more than 11,000 applicants. “This is wide open,” Alexander said. “These people are sitting almost like a jury.”

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The candidates miss few opportunities to plead their case. In a state where campaigning is usually marked by television ads and airport press conferences, Dole, Gramm and especially Alexander are now presenting themselves for inspection at meetings of as few as two dozen delegates.

It is hand-to-hand combat. At a breakfast meeting with undecided delegates in Tarpon Springs last week, Alexander was peppered with questions on trade policy, abortion and how perplexed voters should differentiate between him, Dole and Gramm. Afterward, he was rewarded with about half a dozen new commitments, including one from retiree Joe Petrillo, who complained that Dole and Gramm were “jumping through hoops” to appeal to the “far right.”

All of the straw poll delegates find their mailboxes groaning every day with new missives and invitations from the candidates. Alexander has sent out audiotapes of excerpts from his recently published book about the drive he took across America last year, and the Dole campaign is mass-mailing copies of Richard Ben Cramer’s acclaimed biography of the senator. Gramm, Alexander and Dole have all distributed hundreds of campaign videotapes.

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“Me and my wife,” said a grinning Dan Leigh, a hydro-geologist here, “snuggle up, get a bottle of wine and watch Lamar.”

Even without the Presidency III vote, or P-3, Florida would demand attention from the GOP contenders. The state occupies a strategic position on the presidential chessboard--both in terms of the Republican race and next fall’s general election.

In the general election, strategists for President Clinton are targeting Florida’s 25 electoral votes in the hope of offsetting losses they expect elsewhere in the South. Democrats anticipate, and some Republicans fear, that unrest among the elderly over reductions in the growth of Medicare will allow Clinton to seriously contest the state, even though Democratic presidential candidates have averaged less than 40% of the vote here since 1968 and have won it just three times since World War II.

Several GOP operatives, meanwhile, say they believe that the primary calendar conspires to enshrine Florida, with its 98 delegates, as the state most likely to essentially settle the nomination battle. These operatives anticipate that in the Super Tuesday round of primaries on March 12, Florida will emerge as the critical big-state showdown for the candidates who survive the winnowing process in Iowa, New Hampshire and the other early contests next year.

Thus, the P-3 straw poll has acquired virtually the importance of a first primary for the leading GOP contenders.

For Dole, a victory could revive the momentum that flagged when Gramm surprisingly tied him for first in Iowa’s August straw poll. Conversely, a Florida defeat would be certain to deepen the doubts about his ultimate strength.

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Alexander has virtually relocated to the state; he spent four days here last week and needs a good showing to prove his message of radically devolving power from Washington can lift him from the second tier of candidates.

And Gramm, who has worked hard to carry straw polls all year, needs a strong finish to reverse suspicions in conservative circles that his campaign is losing steam.

Among the other GOP candidates, only Patrick J. Buchanan has any perceptible presence in the state. On his last trip to Florida, he denounced the straw poll’s selection process as “stacked against me,” because about one-fifth of the delegate slots are reserved for elected officials and party contributors who are presumably unsympathetic to his conservative, populist message.

But Buchanan remains something of a wild card here: Despite his criticism of the process, the other campaigns say he has pockets of support, particularly among Christian conservatives.

The biggest wild card is Powell, who is now deciding whether to seek the GOP nomination. Jeb Bush, son of the former President and the chief organizer of the event for the state party, has said he will put the retired general on the ballot if he formally announces his candidacy before the vote.

Powell, coincidentally or not, is due to address a business group that day in Orlando--the site of the P-3 convention.

Mark Wallace, who is organizing support for Powell, says he has “had a good number of the delegates track me down and say: ‘I . . . am willing to vote for Gen. Powell.’ ”

But two days of traveling to delegate meetings around the state last week found surprisingly little interest in the former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman.

“When he started addressing the issues like taxes that were important to business people,” Lamb said, “I didn’t like what he had to say.”

Likewise, in Tarpon Springs, Petrillo said flatly: “No matter how you cut it, Colin Powell is a Democrat.”

Like many of the delegates--perhaps as much as 40% by some counts--both Lamb and Leigh remained undecided as they listened to Alexander in Mt. Dora last week.

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Leigh is leaning toward Gramm: “He has a lot of fire, and he seems to know exactly what he wants to do.” Lamb is choosing between Gramm and Alexander and seems certain that she doesn’t want Dole. “People would not continue to get in this race if Bob Dole was a strong leader,” she said.

Yet support for Dole was evident at the delegate meetings, and the Alexander and Gramm campaigns acknowledge that their phone canvassing shows the Kansan in the lead. Of course, Gramm and Alexander may be attempting to overstate Dole’s strength and understate their own so that their showing will exceed expectations.