Dole, Buchanan in Tight Lead as N.H. Vote Nears

As candidates make their frenzied last-minute appeals, strategists for the leading GOP presidential contenders are bracing for a photo finish in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary that could hurtle the GOP presidential race into uncharted terrain.

Amid the flurry of charges and countercharges and the waves of new negative television ads that marked the campaign’s last weekend, public and private polls showed Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan locked in a tight battle for first--with former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander threatening from his position in third place.

“You are seeing a volatile race in which the primary voters are letting the candidates know they want this to go on for a while,” says John McLaughlin, the pollster for publishing magnate Steve Forbes, who is running fourth in most polls.

As the race moves into its final hours, Dole, the embattled front-runner, is finding himself squeezed in a two-front war with Buchanan and Alexander that has his aides privately constructing scenarios for how they would attempt to rebuild his campaign if he falls short Tuesday.

In this tense sprint to the wire, the three top contenders find themselves so closely matched that the result of their struggle may turn on how many votes are peeled away by the trailing candidates. Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana is attracting moderates who might otherwise vote for Dole or Alexander, and former State Department official Alan Keyes is drawing some social conservative votes from Buchanan.

Among the leaders, Dole is the only candidate with consistent appeal to all elements of the party, polls show. But his support is like an island facing rising waves on all sides.

On one side, Alexander is vigorously competing for the votes of moderates and women, with Forbes also peeling away a substantial number of centrist voters. On another side, Buchanan is battling Dole to a standstill among men and leading decisively among conservatives.

In the three-way competition for the top, Alexander now trails, but he may have the most room to grow. The remaining undecided vote, about a tenth of the electorate, views Alexander much more favorably than any of the other candidates, according to surveys by KRC Communications Research, which is polling daily for the Boston Globe.

But pollsters for several of the campaigns say Alexander has suffered in the past few days from media reports highlighting accusations that he received favored treatment in business deals. And new Dole ads paint him as a “tax-and-spend liberal.” Buchanan too has spent the last few days responding to reports that linked campaign co-chairman Larry Pratt to white supremacist groups.

“We are the only campaign that’s on the offensive,” says Scott Reed, Dole’s campaign manager. “The other guys are all on the defensive.”

Yet in most polls, Dole’s support remains becalmed at 25% or below (though his own surveys put him somewhat higher). History provides a worrisome precedent for the Dole camp: Typically few voters undecided this late move toward the incumbent. And in this race, Dole amounts to the incumbent. “The undecided are not going to break toward Dole,” predicts Gerry Chervinsky, the president of KRC Communications Research.

With so little now separating the leaders, not only the final decisions of the undecided but also overall turnout could be critical. Backed by New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill, Dole has the strongest organization to muscle out votes. But Buchanan has the most committed support, which many observers believe could give him the edge if bad weather or anger at the negative tone of the race drives down the overall vote count.

“Our people will turn out in any kind of weather,” says Mike Hammond, the chairman of his New Hampshire campaign.

In this last stage, the battle for New Hampshire amounts to virtually two separate campaigns: one for the support of moderates, the other for conservatives. The likely Republican primary electorate evenly divides between those groups.

In KRC polling conducted through Friday night, Dole and Alexander ran evenly among moderates, with each attracting about one-fourth of their votes. Forbes, whose support has eroded substantially here since his fourth-place finish in Iowa, still runs credibly with these centrist voters, attracting about one in six. Buchanan won support from only about 7%.

By contrast, Buchanan is consolidating his position as the choice of voters who call themselves conservatives. Fully 36% of New Hampshire’s conservative primary voters now support Buchanan; Dole attracts a fourth. Alexander and Forbes trail among conservatives with just 14% and 10%, respectively.

Support similarly is divided by gender, with Dole and Alexander running even among women, and Buchanan and Dole evenly matched among men.

Even second-tier candidates have their niches in these divergent portions of the electorate. That could be significant: In Iowa, if Buchanan had attracted all the anti-abortion votes that went to Keyes, who won 7% overall, he would have defeated Dole.

This time, Keyes may be a more marginal factor: He’s attracting only about 3% of the vote, 4% among conservatives, in the latest Boston Globe poll. His spoiler role may be assumed by Lugar, who has punched up to about 7% in several surveys, and who might siphon off moderate votes that could otherwise allow Dole, or even Alexander, to finish on top.

The voters still undecided in the race--about 10% in the public polls, about 15% in the estimation of the Dole camp--bend toward the center. In the KRC polling, fully 60% of the undecided voters describe themselves as moderates.

Some portion of voters undecided this late in a race tend to stay home. But those who do turn out may prove a good audience for Alexander. “These undecideds are his votes in the end,” says Chervinsky in a view privately echoed by other campaigns.

In Chervinsky’s polling, the remaining undecided voters are more favorable toward Alexander than toward any of his rivals. Twice as many of them view Alexander positively as negatively; by contrast, just 32% of the undecideds express a positive opinion about Buchanan, while 49% are unfavorable toward him. Dole and Forbes fall between those two extremes.

Alexander is wooing those undecided moderates primarily with a message aimed at their unhappiness over the campaign itself. He’s airing new ads criticizing Dole for “running a negative campaign” and embodying “Washington politics as usual.”

“Mudslinging is the issue in this campaign,” says Mark Merritt, Alexander’s communications director. “This is a primary where a lot of the campaign is about the campaign.”

Buchanan is focusing his final appeal on his two pillars of support: ideological conservatives and working-class voters attracted to his anti-Washington and anti-corporate themes. To close the campaign, Buchanan is directing new mailings at his ideological base: abortion opponents and gun owners.

Today, he will spend the day blitzing talk radio stations--a medium precisely targeted at both the ideological and alienated voters in his sights.

On Saturday night, Dole made a pitch to economically disaffected voters drawn to Buchanan. He unveiled his own economic agenda, which includes more hawkish notes on trade than he had struck so far. But most of the Dole campaign’s energy is devoted to blunting Alexander: Each of the three ads Dole is airing in these last hours of the race attacks the Tennessean.

Fallen New Hampshire front-runner Steve Forbes, now hoping only to finish well enough to demonstrate that his campaign hasn’t entirely stalled, is returning to the outsider and tax-cutting themes that initially attracted moderates and economic conservatives. At the same time, he has launched a concerted effort to make peace with the social conservatives who abandoned him in Iowa.

After devoting weeks to battering Forbes, the Dole campaign is now ironically hoping that the publisher’s support does not collapse completely. If it does, they fear that moderate voters peeling away from Forbes could fuel an Alexander surge that would bring the former governor within reach of the top.

Of course, only two weeks ago, Dole supporters were boosting Buchanan in Louisiana in the hope of kneecapping Sen. Phil Gramm, which he did. On Sunday, the Dole campaign flew Gramm to New Hampshire to deliver an endorsement intended to stop Buchanan.

“Their basic miscalculation was that [they thought] they would be better off battling me than Gramm,” Buchanan said in an interview Sunday night. “They picked the wrong guy.”

Times staff writers Gebe Martinez and John M. Broder contributed to this story.

* GRAMM ENDORSES DOLE: Sen. Phil Gramm, as expected, backed GOP front-runner. A14

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POLL WATCH / New Hampshire Race Tightens

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Bob Dole Pat Buchanan Lamar Alexander BOSTON GLOBE/WBZ 24% 21% 18% N.Y. POST/WNYW 25% 21% 17% AMERICAN RESEARCH GROUP 23% 28% 12% CNN/USA TODAY/GALLUP 26% 25% 20% CONCORD MONITOR/WDH-TV 25% 21% 22%

Steve Forbes BOSTON GLOBE/WBZ 14% N.Y. POST/WNYW 13% AMERICAN RESEARCH GROUP 18% CNN/USA TODAY/GALLUP 12% CONCORD MONITOR/WDH-TV 12%

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THE POLLS: With the New Hampshire primary campaign entering its final 48 hours, a series of polls showed an increasingly tight race, with Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Patrick J. Buchanan appearing to be holding steady while Lamar Alexander, the former governor of Tennessee, moves up and Steve Forbes, the millionaire publisher, falls. The charges that a top aide to Buchanan associated with radical militia organizations and white supremacist groups do not appear to have cost him support but may have slowed his upward momentum. The polls all have a margin of error of between four and five points.