S. Carolina Is Ground Zero for GOP Presidential Fight

In the snowy New Hampshire woods, the two party’s presidential races diverged Tuesday night, and Republicans took the road less traveled--rejecting the orderly coronation of their front-runner for an unpredictable showdown between two contenders offering very different directions.

Arizona Sen. John McCain’s historic rout of Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary set up a pivotal Republican contest on Feb. 19 in South Carolina, while Democrat Al Gore bolstered his position by fighting off challenger Bill Bradley.

Though Bush’s enormous advantages in money, endorsements and the national polls still make him a favorite for the nomination, a South Carolina win for McCain could give the senator a shot at swiping the prize, many GOP analysts say. Over the last 20 years, South Carolina has played the decisive role in settling every contested GOP nomination.

“South Carolina just becomes absolutely critical,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster unaffiliated in the race.

With Bush instantly painting McCain as “a moderate to liberal” candidate, the South Carolina race is also unexpectedly emerging as a test of the party’s ideological direction after its long exile from the White House.

In New Hampshire, McCain built a broad coalition that spanned from independents to mainstream Republican conservatives behind an unorthodox message emphasizing campaign finance reform and directing the federal budget surplus largely toward debt reduction, rather than cutting taxes as Bush proposed.

But selling those arguments could be more difficult for McCain in South Carolina, where Republicans have been less open to mavericks. The state also contains a large contingent of religious conservatives skeptical of the senator on social issues.

“A conservative in New Hampshire,” Bush said hopefully in one television interview Tuesday night, “may not be a conservative in South Carolina or Texas.”

Meanwhile, although Bradley did better in New Hampshire than in Iowa, the New Hampshire result raised pointed questions for him. Though Bradley avoided a fatal blow and has the money to press on--he must overcome Gore’s formidable lead in states such as California, Ohio and even New York after losing the first two contests on the calendar.

But while Bradley has made inroads among both liberal and upscale voters, he has been unable to penetrate Gore’s hold on such pillars of the Democratic coalition as working-class whites and union members, exit polls show. And Bradley now faces a campaign calendar filled with big states where those voters are plentiful, along with minorities, who have heavily favored Gore in early polling. The white college-educated voters that provided the core of Bradley’s support in New Hampshire are less significant in these states, in some cases much less so.

With no Democratic primaries until March 7, Gore and Bradley are engaged in a national duel that will send them careening from coast to coast. In contrast, the Republicans are again concentrating on a single state. Apart from making a brief stop in Delaware, which will vote Tuesday, McCain plans to spend virtually every day in South Carolina until its primary--as does Bush.

In one important respect, the contest between Bush and McCain already signals a tilt away from the right in the GOP. Despite their campaign trail disagreements, both Bush and McCain emerge from the center-right wing of the party. Neither has ever been identified as a member of the cutting-edge conservative movement; at various points in the campaign, both have distanced themselves from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Right’s Candidates Fail to Light a Fire

Though conservative leaders long believed the GOP race would reduce to one candidate from the center and one from the right, none of the most conservative contenders have become serious contenders. From Dan Quayle and New Hampshire Sen. Bob Smith--who were forced from the race before a vote was cast--to Gary Bauer, Alan Keyes and Steve Forbes, the right’s leading lights have all failed to develop a broad constituency. On Wednesday, the conservative National Review called on Forbes, who finished a distant third in New Hampshire, to withdraw from the race.

“It’s a new era,” said Bill Kristol, publisher of the Weekly Standard, another conservative magazine. “In that sense, there is a huge collapse of the conservative establishment.”

Though Bush and McCain have occupied similar ideological space, Bush is increasingly betting his campaign on the belief that he can ideologically polarize the race. When Bush arrived at fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina on Wednesday, he repeatedly referred to himself as a conservative, testified to his commitment to the “born and unborn,” and accused McCain of adopting Democratic arguments against tax cuts.

In the last two decades, the state has functioned as a kind of spa for wounded Republican front-runners: Ronald Reagan in 1980, George Bush in 1988 and Bob Dole in 1996 all clinched the GOP nomination there after stumbling in Iowa or New Hampshire. “Once again, we are going to have to clean up New Hampshire’s mess,” said Warren Tompkins, Bush’s chief strategist in the state.

Compared to New Hampshire, South Carolina clearly presents a more challenging electorate for McCain--a fact reflected in the consistent 20-percentage-point lead Bush has held in polls there.

Independents--who gave McCain a 41-point advantage over Bush in New Hampshire, according to the Times exit poll--constitute a smaller share of the electorate in South Carolina. Conversely, Christian conservatives cast about a third of the votes in South Carolina, compared to only about one-eighth in New Hampshire.

While McCain’s military record gives him some entree with those voters, local analysts say he faces substantial suspicion over his views on abortion; anti-abortion groups also oppose his campaign finance legislation. (Though McCain opposes legalized abortion, he has said he would support amending the anti-abortion language in the GOP platform to provide exemptions for rape, incest and a threat to the life of the mother.) With Forbes and Keyes losing credibility after their poor New Hampshire showings, McCain faces the risk Christian conservatives will consolidate around Bush.

“The social conservatives don’t trust McCain on a lot of the things that are crucial to them,” said James L. Guth, a Furman University political scientist who has extensively studied religious conservatives.

Yet South Carolina is not as monolithically conservative as is often assumed. Rapid growth outside cities such as Greenville and Spartanburg and Columbia has swelled the state GOP with fiscally conservative, socially moderate young suburban families not unlike those who flocked to McCain in southern New Hampshire. Reflecting that change, a CNN/Time poll last weekend found that a striking three-fourths of South Carolina Republicans prefer McCain’s approach to the surplus--centered on debt reduction--to Bush’s call for a large tax reduction.

Potential Wild Card

One potential wild card in both parties’ primaries could be shifting assessments of how well Bush and Gore might compete in November. Many analysts believe Bush’s large and consistent lead over Gore in polls measuring early sentiment for 2000 has been an important factor in both races--encouraging Republicans to coalesce around the Texas governor, and creating an opening for Bradley among Democrats fearful that Gore might lose the White House.

But as Gore has surged past Bradley, he’s also crept up on Bush in nationwide polls; the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed the vice president only 3 percentage points behind the Texas governor. Given Gore’s victory in New Hampshire, and Bush’s loss, analysts like independent pollster John Zogby believe the vice president could actually pull ahead in the next few weeks. That could create new complications for Bush--whose potential electability has been central to his appeal.

“If we are in South Carolina five days after New Hampshire, and we are in an eight-point race, and the Gore and Bush numbers flip, then the national Bush panic will start,” said Mike Murphy, McCain’s chief strategist.

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Times staff writer Steve Braun contributed to this story.

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* SOUTHERN STRATEGIES

An elated McCain, a recommitted Bush arrive in Palmetto State, the next battlefield. A22