Clinton’s Lead Spurs Dole to Review Targets

If all goes according to plan, Bob Dole won’t ever see the pecan and oak trees ringing the Macintosh Commons subdivision here burst into autumn color next month.

But the way the campaign is unfolding, Dole--who stopped in this Atlanta suburb on a sultry summer morning earlier this week--may be back in the neighborhood more often than he’d like, both in person and on television.

Trailing badly in polls, Dole’s campaign faces excruciating decisions as it tries to devise a strategy for winning the 270 electoral votes needed to claim the White House.

Dole aides hope to secure traditionally Republican-leaning states such as Georgia by the end of this month. That would allow them to spend October focusing their two principal resources--television advertising and Dole’s time--on a dozen or so battleground states.

To accomplish that, Dole plans a major escalation in his advertising purchases next week. The ads will focus on a new theme--sharply criticizing President Clinton’s record on combating drugs rather than promoting Dole’s tax-cut plan.

Major Campaign Shift

The new message is a major shift for a campaign that until now has insisted that its tax message would be the key to victory despite polls indicating that the public regards the idea skeptically.

But the breadth of Clinton’s strength is complicating Dole’s decisions on where to focus his advertising dollars--and heightening tensions among Republicans. The target list for the coming advertising blitz marks a new direction for Dole’s campaign. It comes at a time when Clinton is running so strongly that he has the luxury of courting a lengthening list of ordinarily Republican-leaning states--not only Georgia and Florida, but also Colorado and even Arizona, which Clinton visited earlier this week even though no Democrat has carried it since 1948.

“There is a frontier of states that . . . wouldn’t be within reach without our kind of national lead,” said one senior Clinton campaign strategist. “Look at our travel and media schedule: We are going to go aggressively after that frontier. At the least they will have to defend those states; at the worst, they will lose them.”

Under this broad-based pressure from Clinton, Dole’s aides are already being forced toward a kind of triage--deciding which states they will deny resources, which they will fortify with further investments, and which must be expected to recover largely on their own.

These delicate and explosive choices are generating intense private debates in Republican circles. Already some strategists have been urging Dole to shift money away from his uphill assault on California toward potential targets such as Oregon and Washington. Sources say the views of that camp are likely to be reflected in Dole’s new ad campaign. The ad purchase in California will be cut by about half relative to previous weeks, while Oregon and Washington will be added to the list, said one Republican familiar with the plan.

Meanwhile, Dole has decided to spend more money in “base” states such as Florida, Georgia and Arizona. In doing so, he is disregarding advice from some strategists, including his former advertising team of Don Sipple and Mike Murphy, that such a move will dangerously divert money from the indispensable Midwestern battlegrounds.

The reality is that Dole faces no easy choices. Recent polls show him behind even in Republican states such as Indiana, and confronting deficits of about 20 percentage points in states the GOP would like to consider battlegrounds, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California.

Though some of the results are several weeks old, a compilation of state polls released Thursday by the Hotline, an electronic political news service, showed Clinton leading strongly in 27 states and the District of Columbia, which total 321 electoral votes, and running more modestly ahead in seven states commanding another 104 electoral votes--far above the 270 he needs to win.

The state-by-state polls indicate that Dole can claim solid leads in only three states--Alaska, Idaho and Texas--offering a total of 39 electoral votes and narrower leads in 11 others--all in the South, the Great Plains or the Mountain West--that provide 65 electoral votes. In the two remaining states, Alabama and Louisiana, recent polls show conflicting results.

With his lead, Clinton has seized the tactical advantage Republican candidates enjoyed during the 1970s and 1980s. Now it is Clinton who can focus time and money on GOP strongholds, and Dole who is forced to contest states where he faces daunting deficits.

“It forces Dole into a defensive posture,” said Democratic consultant Tad Devine, who experienced the phenomenon from the other end as a principal strategist for candidate Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. “If you take a state from the Republican base and put it in play, you are keeping Dole out of places where he would otherwise spend his money.”

In their effort to devise a winning strategy, Dole aides have divided the 50 states into four categories, with states sometimes slipping between one and the others. These categories include three traditional divisions--states each side can count on as its base and the battlegrounds both sides will contest--as well as an unusual fourth category: states that Dole “must win” but which cannot be considered a reliable part of his base.

The Dole campaign calculates that Clinton can count in his base about 130 reliable electoral votes, including states such as Minnesota, Massachusetts, Maryland, Arkansas and probably Wisconsin.

In their own base, Dole aides count about 130 electoral votes; their math runs from Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas and South Carolina in the South; to Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Indiana; and Utah, Wyoming, Idaho and Alaska in the West.

6 ‘Must-Win’ States

Though recent polls have shown Clinton surprisingly competitive in several of these base states--including Alabama and Virginia as well as Indiana--the Dole campaign hopes to win all of them without virtually any commitment of time or money. Since Dole is running ahead of his national showing in these states, their theory is that if Dole rises nationally, he will automatically move above the waterline in all of them.

The next category in the Dole cartography--the six “must-win” states--has been the most controversial within the campaign. Each of these--Florida, North Carolina and Georgia in the South; Colorado, Arizona and Nevada in the Mountain West--are states where Republicans dominated from 1968 through 1988, but in which Clinton is now running well. Indeed, though Clinton won only three of these states in 1992, aides claim that their private surveys show him now leading in all six.

Before their exit from the campaign earlier this month, Murphy and Sipple argued for minimizing expenditures in these states--with the exception of Georgia, which they considered closer to a legitimate battleground. They maintained these states should be treated as Republican base states and be expected to recover on their own on the basis of an improving national climate.

“If the base doesn’t fix itself as a function of the normally good campaign you are running in the free media, you are going to lose,” said one GOP strategist sympathetic to that perspective.

But the Dole campaign instead has decided to make early investments in these states in the hope of locking them down by the end of September, one senior official said. Georgia, Florida, Colorado, Nevada and Arizona are all expected to be heavy targets for the next wave of Dole ads. The goal is to strengthen Dole’s position to the point where he does not have to spend more time or money in these states after Oct. 1, the official said.

But while strategists such as Murphy have viewed this commitment as too lavish, some Republicans in the affected states fear it is still too stingy. Those worries are sharpest in Florida, a must-win state for Dole where private polls show Clinton ahead.

Resource Allocation

Tom Slade, the GOP chairman in Florida, said he has already become “a little bit hoarse” from hectoring Dole and Republican National Committee officials to increase their commitment to his state. “They’ve got a stronger stomach lining than I do to be so cavalier about this state,” he said.

Slade may be happier with Dole’s latest ad buy, but sustained advertising in Florida would be enormously expensive. It would force Dole to divert resources from other large states at the top of his priority list--including California and the Midwest. That tension is emblematic of another difficult choice facing Dole: how to allocate his resources among the states that the campaign considers battlegrounds.

In that final category, Dole aides now include about 15 states, sources say. Key among them are the traditional industrial-state behemoths of Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Missouri; California and Washington in the West; and Tennessee, Kentucky and Louisiana in the South. Dole aides are also looking at Iowa and Connecticut, though a new survey in Connecticut shows Clinton holding a chasm-size lead.

In its eagerness to raise Dole’s standing, the campaign has been concentrating its resources most heavily on a handful of these states, led by California (at least until now), Pennsylvania and Ohio.

That has generated unease among other Republican strategists. They fear that the campaign is pulling away too quickly from other states such as Illinois and Missouri--which have not been included in the campaign’s most recent media buys after receiving earlier attention. And they worry he is not making enough effort to test the waters in places like Washington and Oregon, where Clinton is leading but might conceivably be vulnerable.

“It’s not an ignorant argument that you go for 10 or so states, and you get tonnage [of advertising] in there,” said one GOP strategist familiar with these talks. “But what you are trying to do when you go for just 10 states is to draw an inside straight.”

Dole’s new ad buy seems shaped by those concerns. While cutting the commitment to California and continuing to exclude Illinois and Missouri, it includes Dole’s first purchases in Oregon, Washington and New York City, which reaches suburbs in Connecticut and New Jersey, said a Republican source familiar with the details.

Clinton’s Strength

Dole’s bigger problem is that unless he can significantly change the national dynamic, none of these calculations will matter much.

Even Republicans privately agree that unless Dole can sharpen an argument that erodes Clinton’s national strength, the relative amount of time and money the challenger devotes to one state as opposed to another probably won’t have much effect on the outcome.