NEWS ANALYSIS : Mixed Results Set Stage for a Volatile Battle

For Bob Dole, the best news in Monday night’s Iowa caucuses was not his own disappointing showing, but an order of finish that kept the rivals he feared most from gaining a clear burst of momentum.

With his unimpressive 26% showing, Dole only narrowly avoided disaster in Iowa. But his advisors took solace from the fact that his closest rival was Patrick J. Buchanan--a candidate the Dole camp continues to believe is too divisive to seriously challenge for the nomination.

Dole’s total fell ominously below his 37% victory margin in 1988--and signaled that many Republican partisans retain serious doubts about him as the party’s standard-bearer against President Clinton this fall.

Iowa thus confirmed the premise that Dole’s rivals hoped to establish here: that the 72-year-old Senate majority leader is a vulnerable front-runner. But it very much left open the question of whether any of them could combine enough momentum and money to take advantage of his apparent weakness in the critical New Hampshire primary one week from today. Rather than significantly resolving the Republican race, the Iowa vote instead set the stage for a volatile New Hampshire battle in which nearly everything is up for grabs.

With Buchanan seizing a strong second place, the evening’s clearest bragging rights went to a polarizing contender with a solid base of support in New Hampshire but limited cash and a negative rating among likely New Hampshire primary voters that exceeds 40%.

As in last week’s Louisiana caucus, Buchanan demonstrated here a powerful appeal to social conservatives that should make him a force in the race for weeks to come. But he still faces an uphill fight to convince less-ideological voters that he is more than a protest candidate.

The results are bound to provide a significant boost for former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who surged to third place and appeared virtually giddy with joy as he appeared on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Monday night.

“With Alexander finishing ahead of Steve Forbes in Iowa, I believe New Hampshire will have a one-week flirtation with Alexander,” said Gerry Chervinsky, whose KRC Research polls extensively in the state.

But Alexander still has a lot of ground he must make up in New Hampshire and little money with which to do so. A Chervinsky poll for the Boston Globe released Monday morning showed Alexander with support from just 5% of voters there. And unless Alexander can break into the top two in New Hampshire, he may lack the funds to meaningfully compete in the cascade of Southern primaries in early March.

Most important for Dole, Steve Forbes, whose multimillion-dollar advertising blitz has moved him near the Kansas senator at the top of the New Hampshire polls, suffered a grievous disappointment, fading to a fourth-place finish. Under a withering attack from his opponents, Forbes has already been losing ground in New Hampshire, and these results could place his campaign under tremendous pressure in the next few days.

“This puts a big hit on Forbes,” said Scott Reed, Dole’s campaign manager.

The results were even more damaging to Sen. Phil Gramm, who one year ago seemed virtually certain to emerge as Dole’s chief rival. Although the Texan said he would press on despite his fifth-place finish--after saying earlier in the week that he had to finish within the top three to remain a viable candidate--his poor showing leaves his campaign virtually on life support.

Traditionally, Iowa has done more to identify the losers than anoint the winners, and this year’s exercise continued the trend. Monday night’s results left little pulse in the campaigns not only of Gramm, but also Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and second-tier contenders Robert K. Dornan and businessman Morry Taylor, whose political heartbeats were dim to begin with.

For Dole, any victory was welcome after the turmoil his campaign endured in January. Only a few weeks ago, he appeared to be reeling under the combined onslaught of Forbes’ negative advertising and overwhelmingly negative reviews for his funereal response to President Clinton’s State of the Union address.

Dole’s modest margin of victory gave his rivals cause for optimism. Nonetheless, he had the most success at drawing both voters focused on cultural issues and those motivated by economics. “It appears we got a healthy vote from social conservatives and economic conservatives,” Reed said. Buchanan ran well with religious conservatives, and Alexander with voters who didn’t identify with the religious right, but both had only limited appeals to the other camp.

Yet other trends were less encouraging for the Dole camp. According to an entrance poll conducted for television networks and the Associated Press, Dole ran most strongly with older voters, who are far more numerous here than in New Hampshire (or, for that matter, most states). Those voters who said their principal criterion was picking a candidate who could beat Bill Clinton preferred Alexander to Dole by 16 percentage points.

And the Iowa result sketched the outline of a potential race that could see Dole squeezed from both sides--with Alexander or Forbes focusing on socially moderate, upscale suburbanites and Buchanan attracting both religious conservatives and downscale blue-collar voters drawn to his bristling economic nationalism.

Those religious conservatives left no doubt here that they will play a major role in determining the next Republican nominee. According to the voter survey, one-third of the Republicans voting Monday identified themselves as religious conservatives. They gave 41% of their votes to Buchanan, just over double the share won by Dole.

Those same voters powered former Reagan administration official Alan Keyes’ 7% showing, which nipped at the heels of Gramm and Forbes. If Keyes’ supporters had shifted to Buchanan--as Buchanan had urged this past weekend--he would have passed Dole for the top position.

In New Hampshire, religious conservatives play a minor role; but they are again a dominant force as the calendar shifts to the South in early March. For Buchanan, Gramm’s poor finish may have been as gratifying as his own strong one: Heading into the vote, Buchanan’s aides said one of their top goals here was to eliminate Gramm as a viable rival for conservative votes, particularly across the South.

Forbes’ money assures him a measure of resilience. His checkbook renders him immune to the disease that usually fells candidates who suffer disappointing results--a collapse in their fund-raising. But the Iowa battle suggests formidable challenges ahead for Forbes, not only because his showing did not match his expectations, but because it demonstrated that his opponents have found effective ways of increasing voter doubts about him.

With persistent attacks on his signature proposal for a flat tax; ads portraying him as untested and inexperienced; and a concentrated effort to portray him as a social liberal on issues ranging from abortion to welfare, Forbes’ rivals succeeded in raising his negative ratings among Iowa Republicans to astounding heights. Forbes compounded his problems with a negative advertising campaign that many here viewed as excessive and by launching an attack last weekend on the influential Christian Coalition. The combination proved devastating. In the last Des Moines Register poll before the vote, fully 46% of likely caucus-goers expressed a negative opinion of Forbes; in New Hampshire, the comparable figure is already up to 37%.

Forbes’ decline here set the stage for a battle in New Hampshire between the millionaire publisher and Alexander for the allegiance of moderate, more secular and independent voters--who are far more numerous in the Granite State than here. Alexander’s advantage in that competition is the lowest negative ratings of any leading Republican in New Hampshire; Forbes’ advantage is a message targeted toward the state’s hostility to taxes and the bankbook to ensure that everyone hears it.

Perhaps more than anything else, the Iowa results demonstrated that only 15 months after the GOP’s historic sweep of Congress, Republicans remain deeply uncertain whether they have found in their field a candidate who can inspire all of the party’s divergent elements and recapture the White House. Only a few hours before the vote, Rush Limbaugh lamented on his radio program that “there isn’t a Reaganesque figure out there who charges me up and jazzes me up.”

With its divided and unenthusiastic embrace of the front-runner Bob Dole--and the enshrinement of Buchanan, a man many GOP leaders still consider unelectable, as potentially his chief rival--Iowa’s Republicans Monday night appeared to be saying the same thing.