Republican Primary Could Be Decided by Democrats

With most polls showing a dead heat, the South Carolina presidential primary is shaping up as a pivotal event in the fight for the Republican nomination. And it’s Democrats who could decide it.

Like Beth McKiernan, who loves President Clinton and subscribes to the Democratic Party orthodoxy on such issues as abortion and gun control. Still, she plans to cast her ballot Saturday for John McCain, the first Republican to win her vote.

“I hate to sound trite, but I love his biography,” McKiernan, 44, said of the Vietnam War hero, who drew an overflow crowd of hundreds during a stop at the small firehouse in this upcountry town. “I want somebody in there who can roll with the punches.”

Rules allowing all comers to participate in South Carolina’s vote have created a crazy-quilt contest in this first Southern primary, blurring party lines, testing political loyalties and probing whether the GOP is ripe for the sort of realignment that helped make Ronald Reagan president.

Hoping to replicate his victory in New Hampshire--which became a rout thanks to heavy support from independents--McCain is aggressively courting crossover votes in South Carolina.

“Come Democrats! Come Libertarians! Come vegetarians! Come all of you!” the senator from Arizona cried at a recent barbecue in Seneca.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, meantime, is running far stronger than McCain among traditional Republican voters--the bricks and mortar of his hoped-for Southern firewall--and has sought to make McCain’s appeal to swing voters a strike against him. “I’m a little concerned about who’s coming into the party,” Bush told an audience in Saluda earlier this week, suggesting crossover Democrats may be trying to sabotage the Republicans by picking the weakest candidate to face their nominee in the fall.

Vote Could Ripple Throughout Race

The results Saturday could resound in contests that follow three days later in Michigan and Arizona, and two weeks after that in California, New York and more than a dozen other states. A McCain win in South Carolina would throw the Republican race wide open by turning establishment jitters over Bush’s stumbling start into widespread panic; a Bush win could nip McCain’s insurgency before it blooms into more than a February fancy.

The key question is this: How many Democrats like McKiernan will shed their party allegiance--at least temporarily--and how many independents will join them to vote in the Republican primary?

“It’s the signal variable, absolutely the most important thing in determining the outcome,” said David Woodard, a Clemson University political science teacher and co-director of the statewide Palmetto Poll. “I’ve looked at figures until I was blue in the face, trying to figure it out, and I can’t. If anybody tells you they can, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Dick Harpootlian, South Carolina’s Democratic chairman, denies any organized effort to muck around in the GOP contest. But with so much focus on the Bush-McCain race--the advertising and news coverage has been as pervasive as the pollen that coats the state in springtime--anyone who is politically aware can’t help but get interested.

Another big lure for Democratic loyalists to vote in the Republican race is that they have no competing primary of their own on Saturday. (South Carolina Democrats pick their presidential favorites in caucuses on March 9.)

Experts predict a record turnout in the GOP race, with as many as 400,000 of the state’s roughly 2 million eligible voters participating. As many as 25,000 Democrats could cross party lines, Harpootlian estimates, enough to make a difference in a close race.

“If you’re having an exhibition football game between the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins, even if you hate both teams, at some point you’re going to start taking a side,” Harpootlian said. “Especially if you’re being bombarded with $5 [million] or $6 million in advertising. It’s just human nature.”

Most analysts agree the bigger the turnout, the better for McCain, given Bush’s support among hard-core Republicans that are certain to show up.

It is, in fact, technically misleading to speak of Republicans and Democrats in South Carolina. There is no party registration here, a vestige of the days when Democrats were so powerful in the South that registering was a moot point.

Still, most of the state’s voters divide into clear camps. Woodard, in his surveys for the Palmetto Poll, found the percentage who identify themselves as Republican tends to run in the high 30s, independents in the low 30s and Democrats in the high 20s.

After decades of political irrelevancy, Republicans held their first primary here in 1980. The intention back then was to draw independents and conservative Democrats into the GOP fold--the very sort of crossover voting that Bush and other Republicans today deplore.

State Results Have Been a GOP Bellwether

Previous GOP primaries have been a bellwether; no candidate has won the party’s nomination without first winning the state. But the contests have also signaled subtle realignments within the party. In 1988, Lee Atwater--a South Carolina native and strategist for the elder George Bush--helped lure fundamentalist Christians and more downscale voters to Republican ranks by emphasizing the party’s conservative stance on defense and social issues. They have been a vital part of the state’s GOP base ever since.

This year, the McCain campaign is attempting a similar strategy of outreach, in this case courting more well-to-do independents and Democrats, many of them military veterans or others attracted by the senator’s compelling personal history and reformist message.

Eston Clarke, a Democrat who showed up for a town meeting with McCain in a big tent outside the Darlington Raceway, said he always believed Republicans to be more hard-hearted in their philosophy than Democrats. But he will vote for McCain “because of the man. He’s an American hero” whose personal integrity and principles “leap over the other questions,” Clarke said.

McCain has done more than merely welcome Clarke and other stray Democrats. Increasingly, he is fashioning his campaign around the notion that he alone has Reagan’s ability to reach across party lines and draw new voters to the GOP--voters the party will need to win in November. “The Republican Party has lost its way,” he asserted in Tuesday night’s debate in Columbia, citing GOP’s losses in the last two presidential campaigns.

The party needs “to open up,” McCain said, “get independents, reconstitute the old Reagan Democrats. I’m being criticized now because Democrats may like me. I want to reconstitute that governing coalition. I can do it.”

That remains to be seen. McCain would have to win not just South Carolina but carry Michigan, California and other states that allow cross-party voting. More fundamentally, he would have to win the lasting loyalty of Democrats even when they have the chance to vote for one of their own.

“If it was McCain vs. Gore or Bradley in November, I’d have trouble deciding,” said McKiernan, who waited hours for the overdue Republican insurgent to make his late-night appearance in Greer. “I want John McCain to win [the Republican nomination] just so I can have that choice.”

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