POLITICS : Voters, Anxious About Issues, Feel Snowed by GOP Candidates : The Republican field, and attack campaigns, leave the Iowa and New Hampshire electorate restless.

Winter has socked this state with a vengeance, and so has discontent.

But it’s not with the record-breaking temperatures that have nestled on the wrong side of zero for days; Iowans brag about their hardiness. The frustration is with the gaggle of would-be Republican presidential nominees elbowing for their votes, and all seemingly indistinguishable in their mediocrity.

Listen to Roger Bahr:

“It’s getting rather confusing. They’re just going around putting each other down,” said the 56-year-old engineer who lives in Walker, about 20 miles north of Cedar Rapids.

More than 1,000 miles away, Don Chase of Derry, N.H., is venting his displeasure as well.

“Republicans are going to have a problem if they don’t do something soon,” the retired firefighter said. “People are really looking for a change, and if the Republicans don’t give it to them, they’re going to be in trouble.”

Bahr and Chase, both staunch Republicans, illustrate the dilemma facing the crowded field of GOP contenders as they jockey for advantage just days away from Iowa’s influential caucuses on Feb. 12 and New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Feb. 20.

To be sure, many voters long ago made up their minds to back particular candidates. But extensive interviews with Republicans in both the Hawkeye and Granite states found large numbers of voters who remain unimpressed and undecided, or lean so tentatively toward one candidate that belief in--or, more often, disgust with--the negative ads on television could easily push them away.

And while the candidates hammer on tried-and-true themes like balancing the federal budget or focus on this season’s hot topic, the flat tax, these disquieted voters complain that they have yet to address other questions of consequence to them: health care, Social Security, farming, schools.

“I still have to hear more from them about the issues,” said Kris Boisveit, 40, a self-employed seamstress from Nashua, N.H., after a Merrimack Chamber of Commerce dinner this week which featured Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the onetime clear front-runner in the race who now is fending off a charge by publishing magnate Steve Forbes.

It’s no longer just “the economy, stupid,” the mantra of Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign in 1992. A host of other problems vexes voters this year, said Arthur Miller, a political scientist who heads the University of Iowa’s Social Science Institute.

“There’s another cloud of issues that focus on crime, safety on the streets, gangs in schools . . . [and] a cloud of moral issues--family values, prayer in schools and education more generally,” Miller said. “The candidates aren’t addressing this.”

His institute’s own surveys reveal the large number of voters in Iowa who have yet to pick one man among the nine wooing the state’s 578,000 registered Republicans. A new poll by the Boston Globe in New Hampshire also showed a high level of indecision.

“This is not necessarily surprising, because we are in a period of shrinking and weakening partisan ties, and a strong Republican [Party member] today isn’t as strong as a strong Republican 15 years ago,” Miller said. “So more and more people are making up their minds later in the campaign sequence. But when you couple it with other indicators, like the significant number of people who are not pleased with any of the candidates,” then the outcome of the caucuses is thrown in doubt.

Take Larry and Pat Salger, who live near Cedar Rapids, home of the country’s largest cereal manufacturing plant and, perhaps improbably, the brand-new National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library. Rockwell International is the biggest employer in this middle-class town, which boasts an average annual household income of $45,900. As Iowa’s second-largest city, Cedar Rapids is the seat of Linn County, which Dole won in the 1988 caucuses on his way to victory statewide.

Born-and-bred Iowans and dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, the Salgers open a mailbox stuffed with campaign fliers every day and hear a negative television spot practically every other minute. Months ago, they had settled on Dole as their candidate.

“We felt he was the one, the most capable,” said Larry Salger, 68, a retired agricultural chemical worker. But in a nod to the ads attacking Dole, funded mostly by Forbes, “now we’re not sure.”

“They’ve done an awful lot of politicking without getting at the issues,” added Pat Salger, 63, who wants to know where the candidates stand on health care. “I don’t think we’ll hear about that before the election for real, because at this point, it’s just politics.”

They dismiss Forbes’ emphasis on his flat-tax proposal as appealing but infeasible.

Carolyn Clubine of tiny, rural Dunkerton, Iowa--she and her husband are two out of 746 residents--is more open to the concept, but suspects its source.

“Is he going to care about us little business-people and the common worker?” Clubine, 54, said of Forbes. “We’re farmers, so I’m interested in the [agricultural] programs, the tax issue, property issues. I haven’t heard anyone offer anything as far as our lifestyle and our business is concerned.”

She has not picked a candidate yet and would prefer one who supported a national sales tax. When told that Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana espouses just such a policy, Clubine expressed surprise, then resignation over campaign rules that have allowed one contender--Forbes--to dominate the airwaves in both Iowa and New Hampshire through his seemingly limitless personal treasury (in the new Boston Globe poll of New Hampshire residents, fully 85% said they had seen a Forbes ad).

Lugar is “one I’ve never heard of,” Clubine said. “How do we know some of these little guys aren’t the best candidate? But money talks. It always has, and it always will.”

In Alton, N.H., Chris Wittman feels aggrieved that little publicity has been devoted to her own choice for the nomination, conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan.

“We get Dole down the throat all the time, but nobody I know is voting for Dole. He’s too wishy-washy. He’s George Bush all over again,” said Wittman, a musician. “People shouldn’t have to hold their nose then they go in the voting booth.”

According to Miller, the University of Iowa political scientist, the key for Dole is to hold on to his professed supporters and, if not convert the undecided, then at least sour them on his rivals, especially Forbes, who has been running a strong second in some polls and even taken the lead in others.

Responding to this surge, the Dole campaign has unleashed ads painting Forbes as an untested novice and a wasteful spender in the sole government position he held, a part-time post as head of the board that oversees the operation of Radio Free Europe.

But the slew of negative campaigning has soured many voters on the whole process, or on the very candidates who mount the TV spots.

“They’re almost dividing the Republican Party, because it seems like they’re all against each other. They should be united,” said Karen Bahr, Roger Bahr’s wife.

“At first I would’ve leaned towards Dole. Then I would’ve said Forbes. And now I’m leaning towards [former Tennessee Gov. Lamar] Alexander, because he’s the only one who’s not running a negative campaign,” said Karen Farmer, 47, a math teacher in Oelwein, Iowa, and a former caucus chairwoman.

“We don’t even watch TV that much, but it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s night or day,” Farmer said over a plate of rice and stir-fried vegetables. “It’s the only advertising we’ve got right now.”