Iowa and New Hampshire: the Yin and Yang of the GOP

From Iowa to New Hampshire over the next 10 days, the Republican presidential candidates face a breathless steeplechase through two divergent states that now constitute almost opposite poles of the modern GOP political coalition.

Combined, these first two contests will probably attract only about 300,000 voters--just one-seventh as many as turned out for the 1992 GOP presidential primary in California alone.

But these two small states, often derided as insular and unrepresentative, could in fact provide an instant preview of the demographic competition that would decide a GOP nomination battle.

Republican politics in Iowa, where Bob Dole holds a narrow advantage in public polls, is now heavily shaped by religious conservatives. Those voters also command a central role in the GOP across the South and a critical, if less dominant, position through much of the Midwest.

In the New Hampshire Republican primary, where most polls show Steve Forbes leading, much greater influence resides with younger and secular voters who are moved more by economic rather than cultural concerns. Similar voters are common across New England and the West, including California.

With its large social conservative turnout, Iowa could foreshadow the results in many of the Southern and Midwestern primaries that come next month, while New Hampshire may more closely resemble the contests in the Northeast and West. If that pattern develops--in a race primarily between Forbes and Dole, for instance--the critical battlegrounds would be the large states that fall in between the demographic poles, particularly Florida, Illinois, Ohio and New York.

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With their sharp demographic contrasts, Iowa and New Hampshire will offer revealing signals on how the competition down the road might work out.

Iowa will test whether Forbes can exercise any appeal for social conservatives; New Hampshire will measure whether Dole can attract younger and less partisan voters still anxious for change in Washington. Likewise, Iowa will test whether Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas or commentator Patrick J. Buchanan has a stronger claim on the social conservatives they need to sustain their candidacies. And both states will show whether former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander can find a niche with moderate and less religious voters, particularly among women, that allows him to emerge into contention.

Since it inaugurated its primary in 1952, New Hampshire has influenced the selection of the GOP nominee much more than Iowa. New Hampshire and other states later on the calendar, for example, rejected Iowa’s choice of George Bush in 1980 and Bob Dole in 1988.

But the balance between Iowa and New Hampshire may be shifting as Republican politics in both states are transformed and the center of power within the GOP itself moves toward the socially conservative South.

Once a bastion of moderates, Iowa has seen its Republican politics move sharply to the right as religious conservatives inspired by Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential bid have surged into the party. And New Hampshire’s Republican politics have moved in a more libertarian direction as a result of what pollster Gerry Chervinsky calls “baby boomers who have moved to southern New Hampshire to avoid taxes in Massachusetts.”

Now, with its heavy concentration of social conservatives, Iowa may be a closer reflection of the modern Republican political base than New Hampshire, and thus perhaps a more accurate predictor of the final result in the race.

“It’s not plausible anymore that you can be the nominee of the Republican Party unless you have some strength among religious conservatives,” said John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron and an expert on religion in politics. “In that sense, Iowa probably mirrors the national Republican coalition more closely than New Hampshire.”

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Yoked together by their privileged places on the election calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire are very much the odd couple of Republican politics.

* Nearly half of likely Iowa caucus voters are older than 55; in 1992, nearly two-thirds of New Hampshire primary voters were younger than 50.

* One-third of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire are Catholic; about 80% of those attending Iowa caucuses are Protestant, according to surveys by the Des Moines Register and Forrest Conklin, a professor of communication studies at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

* Agricultural workers are a tiny part of the New Hampshire electorate. In contrast, about one-fourth of Iowa caucus voters have a link to the farm, Conklin has found.

But the most important differences between Iowa and New Hampshire are in the relative strengths of religious conservative voters and independents.

The Iowa caucuses are open only to Republicans. Though the rules allow voters to re-register as Republicans at the door, in practice, the culture of the event, which involves a lengthy meeting with other political activists, has historically kept down the independents participating to about 10%.

In New Hampshire, the primary is open to independents. In the 1988 and 1992 presidential primaries, exit polls showed that non-Republicans constituted about 30% or more of the vote.

Some Republican analysts say the number of true independents in the New Hampshire race may be closer to 20% or 25%. But no one doubts that independents exert far more influence in New Hampshire than in Iowa. These New Hampshire independents tend to be younger, more upscale and clustered in the lower part of the state.

The prominence of those younger independents drives the second major difference between the states: the greater importance of religious conservatives in Iowa. Whit Ayres, the pollster for Alexander, says about 60% of likely Republican voters in Iowa attend church at least once a week; in New Hampshire, the comparable figure is only about 25%.

In Conklin’s surveys, nearly two-thirds of Iowa caucus attendees support an absolute ban on abortion. By contrast, half of the New Hampshire Republican primary electorate--as much as 60% in some polls--believe that abortion should remain legal.

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In his surveys, Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who works for Dole, divides the GOP electorate into three broad categories. In Iowa, McInturff estimates, one-third of the likely caucus voters are social conservatives; 40% are economic conservatives and the remaining 27% are moderates. In New Hampshire, his polls show, 11% of primary voters are social conservatives, about half are economic conservatives and the remaining 38% are moderates and independents.

“New Hampshire [has] the lowest share of religious conservatives in the country,” McInturff said.

Iowa’s mix benefits Dole, who has some appeal in all three camps. Against a single candidate to his right on social issues, the state might now present a problem for the Senate majority leader, but the religious-right vote here is splintering among Gramm, Buchanan, Alan Keyes and Dole himself.

For Forbes, the relative paucity of independents and the large presence of religious conservatives, many of whom look with suspicion on his views about abortion and other social issues, make Iowa difficult terrain. His problem is compounded by the preponderance of older voters; Forbes runs better among the young. Iowa has its share of suburban growth areas, particularly outside Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, with baby-boom families that resemble those in southern New Hampshire. And experts believe Forbes could run well in those areas--perhaps along with Alexander, whose social moderation and focus on education give him an opening with young suburban families.

“My guess is that in many of those suburban households, you’ll see the male go for Forbes and the female go for Alexander,” said Brian Kennedy, the baby-boomer chairman of the Iowa GOP.

Given the state’s makeup, it is a testament to Forbes’ campaign, and the power of his advertising barrage, that he continues to run second in Iowa polls. But it remains unclear whether he can ensure a large turnout from his supporters, who tend to lack the partisan intensity that has predicted participation in the caucuses.

New Hampshire flips the demographic advantage. With few social conservatives, a large number of independents and an economically oriented electorate focused on taxes, the state is “just perfect for Forbes,” says former Republican National Committee Chairman Rich Bond, a Dole supporter.

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In Chervinsky’s most recent survey for the Boston Globe, fully half of Forbes’ support in New Hampshire came from voters who backed Ross Perot or Bill Clinton over Bush in the 1992 general election. Among self-identified Republicans in the state, Dole and Forbes ran even; but Forbes led Dole by nearly 4 to 1 among independents planning to vote in the GOP primary.

Few other states provide Forbes with as much of a potential advantage. Outside of New England, which is likely fertile territory for Forbes, the contests with comparable percentages of independents tend to be Southern states with no party registration.

But while Forbes may have appeal in those states’ burgeoning suburbs, half or more of the Republican vote in many Southern primaries comes from religious conservatives whose leaders are intensifying their public criticism of Forbes.

“In a one-on-one race, [those voters] could be Forbes’ Achilles’ heel,” said Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition.

But Forbes may not have to face a one-on-one contest for social conservatives if Buchanan (or, now less likely, Gramm) runs well enough in the early primaries to compete for evangelical voters in the South and anti-abortion Catholics in the Midwest. “Dole could really get whipsawed if there is a strong right-wing challenge and Forbes is essentially to his left,” said the University of Akron’s Green.

That’s one nightmare scenario for Dole supporters. The other is that a New Hampshire defeat could set off a chain reaction of negative publicity that overwhelms Dole’s demographic advantages in the South and Midwest.

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“It could be that New Hampshire is such a self-fulfilling prophecy that it could still be determinative, even if it is increasingly less representative,” said Stu Rothenberg, editor of a Washington-based political newsletter.

The changing demography of the Republican electoral coalition may now make it possible to win the nomination without winning New Hampshire--something that probably wasn’t true before. But no one, least of all Bob Dole, is eager to be the test case that proves the proposition.

* CLINTON IN IOWA

The president asks voters to gauge economic progress. A18