2 Wins Set Stage for Drawn-Out, Epic GOP Fight

John McCain’s back-from-the-brink victories in Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday night ensured a protracted nomination fight between two rivals now mobilizing virtually mirror-image voter coalitions in an epic struggle over the Republican Party’s direction.

Just three days after a crushing defeat in South Carolina, McCain carried voters across the board in his home state of Arizona and rode an unprecedented turnout of independents and Democrats to stun George W. Bush in Michigan, Los Angeles Times/Voter News Service exit polls in the two states found.

With his Michigan victory, McCain demonstrated again his capacity to upend the Republican race by turning out nontraditional primary voters drawn to his maverick persona and reform message. But, in a clear danger sign for the resurgent insurgent, even in this more moderate Midwestern state, the exit poll found that Bush still defeated McCain among partisan Republicans by more than 2 to 1, a showing little different from the result in staunchly conservative South Carolina.

For all his renewed vitality, those numbers suggest McCain still faces significant obstacles in trying to overthrow Bush: Few analysts, including senior aides in his own camp, think the senator from Arizona can realistically win the nomination if he consistently loses Republican voters by margins of about 40 percentage points, as he did in both South Carolina and Michigan.

But, coming just days after McCain was rocked by Bush’s resounding South Carolina win, the dual victories are certain to provide McCain a powerful new surge of momentum. And that could allow him to make a new case with Republican voters for his iconoclastic agenda of fiscal discipline, debt reduction, military strength and campaign finance reform, an approach that Bush has tried to paint as too moderate for the GOP mainstream.

“McCain is Lazarus, there is no question,” said GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio, who is unaligned in the race. “And again the Bush people are looking in the mirror, saying, ‘What do we have to do to kill this guy?’ ”

Adds Scott Reed, Bob Dole’s campaign manager in 1996: “I think McCain has an opportunity to grow [among Republicans] now. Republicans want a winner and they want somebody who can appeal across party lines to independents and nontraditional voters. What [Tuesday] shows is that McCain’s candidacy--this populist maverick campaign--can do that.”

The Los Angeles Times/VNS exit poll interviewed 2,315 voters at 40 precincts in Michigan. In Arizona, the survey interviewed 2,396 voters at 40 precincts. Both polls have a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. VNS is a partnership of Associated Press and ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox and NBC News.

Voter Similarities Seen in S.C., Michigan

To a remarkable extent, Democrats, independents and Republicans all divided their votes in Michigan almost exactly the way they did in South Carolina--with the first two groups favoring McCain, and the latter backing Bush by comparable margins in both states. The difference was that McCain’s supporters proved a larger share of the electorate in this contest than in South Carolina on Saturday, providing him his margin of victory. Indeed, in this ostensibly Republican primary, independents and Democrats cast 52% of the votes, the exit poll found.

In the weeks ahead, even with this new boost, McCain will face new challenges because several of the key states voting, such as New York and Connecticut, hold “closed” primaries in which only registered Republicans can participate. In California, which will vote March 7, any registered voter can express a preference in the “beauty contest,” but the state’s GOP delegates will be allocated solely by the vote among Republicans. In mid-March, McCain must face a gantlet of Southern states with conservative electorates similar to the one that provided Bush’s victory in South Carolina.

Still, McCain will have plenty of opportunities in the weeks ahead to replicate the centrist coalition he assembled Tuesday in Michigan: states such as Washington and Virginia (which vote next Tuesday), Ohio and Missouri (which come on March 7) and Illinois (on March 21) allow any voter to participate. And even some of the “closed primary” states, such as New York, contain much more moderate Republican electorates that could lean toward McCain.

Independent pollster John Zogby says that McCain may also benefit from a backlash among moderate Northeastern Republicans, and Catholics across the Northeast and Midwest, to Bush’s appearance earlier this month at fundamentalist Bob Jones University, whose leaders have denounced Catholicism in the past. “It’s definitely something that can work for McCain,” said Zogby.

Though the VNS exit poll did not provide data on how many Michigan voters were Catholic, Zogby’s final poll in the state showed McCain with a solid lead among Catholic voters, an important voting bloc in such upcoming states as Ohio, New York and Illinois.

In Arizona, McCain held his home-court advantage by amassing a surprisingly easy and widespread victory, the exit poll found. Though Bush had the support of Arizona Republican Gov. Jane Dee Hull, McCain won virtually every demographic group by solid margins. He beat Bush convincingly not only among independents, but also Republicans; McCain won not only moderates, but also voters who described themselves as somewhat conservative.

Even voters who termed themselves members of the religious right split evenly between the two. Bush’s one redoubt in Arizona was the one-fourth of primary voters who described themselves as very conservative: They gave the Texas governor about a 15-percentage-point margin.

But the evening’s main event was clearly Michigan, whose Republican governor, John Engler, had moved up the primary specifically to bolster Bush. Leading social conservatives, led by televangelist Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, poured resources into the state hoping to bury McCain after his stumble in South Carolina.

Instead, the contest became another testament to McCain’s ability to expand the electorate: like South Carolina, Michigan allows any registered voter to participate in the GOP primary. In 1996, with Patrick J. Buchanan making a protectionist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats and independents cast 38% of the votes in the GOP primary.

But even as turnout more than doubled in Michigan compared to four years ago, McCain further increased the non-Republican portion of the vote: Independents cast more than a third of the total vote, and Democrats nearly a fifth; incredibly, union members, who predominantly vote Democratic, cast more than one-third of the votes in the GOP primary.

With all those groups, McCain amassed huge margins. McCain carried more than 4 in 5 Democrats, 3 in 5 union members and two-thirds of independents.

Some of those voters seemed to view the primary less as a chance to boost McCain than to deflate Engler: among the nearly 1 in 6 voters who said Engler was a major influence in their vote, about 70% supported McCain.

But more was clearly at work than mere mischief. McCain also won several of the key arguments the two candidates have been disputing. For starters, almost 4 in 5 of McCain voters said they considered him the strongest Republican nominee in the fall. Nearly three-fourths of all voters in the primary said they believed campaign finance reform would improve the political process; more than half of those voting said they preferred to use the surplus primarily to bolster Social Security (as McCain has urged) rather than to cut taxes (as Bush has stressed).

Poll Holds Some Good News for Bush

In contrast to South Carolina, more Michigan voters said Bush’s attacks on McCain were unfair than vice versa. And considerably more Michigan voters said they considered McCain a “real reformer” than Bush, another reversal of the South Carolina result.

Yet the exit poll results also showed why Bush, though knocked down by the defeats, can hardly be counted out. Even though the overall tenor of the electorate was considerably more moderate in Michigan than in South Carolina, McCain made extraordinarily little progress in denting Bush’s hold on rank-and-file Republicans.

While McCain attracted almost exactly the same percentage of Democrats as he did in South Carolina and slightly improved his showing among independents, Bush almost precisely replicated his dominance among Republicans. In South Carolina, Bush won 69% of Republican votes; in Michigan, he won just about two-thirds, including substantial majorities among both GOP conservatives and moderates.

With such results in mind, McCain aides acknowledge they need to rebuild the connections with GOP partisans they developed in New Hampshire, where the senator ran even with Bush among Republicans. In his victory speech Tuesday night, McCain immediately began that effort, with a vividly intimate appeal to Republicans. “Don’t fear this campaign, my fellow Republicans: join it, join it,” he cried. “We are creating a new majority, my friends, a McCain majority.”

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Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus contributed to this story.

* WAR OF WORDS CONTINUES

Bill Bradley, campaigning in New York, stepped up his attacks on Al Gore. A13