Bush, Gore Need to Tap Vast Pool of Centrist Voters

After a stormy primary season, all signs point toward a turbulent general election that will pit Al Gore and George W. Bush in a tense competition for independent and centrist voters who begin the race skeptical of both.

Gore and Bush put themselves on track for a November face-off by consolidating their parties’ traditional voters against opponents who tried to construct coalitions around calls for political reform. Now Gore, who has virtually clinched the Democratic nomination Tuesday, and Bush, who effectively captured the Republican prize, face a common challenge as they look toward the fall: attracting the less partisan, more independent voters that powered their rivals’ insurgencies.

“What Bill Bradley and John McCain point out, among other things, are the vulnerabilities of Gore and Bush: the kind of voters they had appeal to are the kind of voters Bush and Gore didn’t have appeal to,” says Democratic consultant Bill Carrick. “And now we are going to see who can make progress at expanding beyond their base.”

The challenge is especially intriguing because neither Gore nor Bush seems an ideal fit for the reform-minded independents who flocked, in particular, to McCain--and could represent the decisive swing vote in November.

Bush faces hurdles because Gore’s positions are much closer to McCain’s than the Texas governor’s are on the key issues McCain stressed: reforming the campaign finance system and rejecting a large tax cut. Bush’s cash-drenched campaign--marked by record-setting fund-raising, a decision to abandon the spending limits in the primary and support from controversial independent advertising campaigns--may also make him a hard sell for voters disaffected from big-money politics.

On the other hand, Gore’s indelible association with the campaign finance and personal scandals of the Clinton administration makes him an unlikely vehicle for voters seeking change in the capital--what Bush calls a “fresh start” in Washington. McCain, who is expected to suspend his campaign today, conceivably could attract many of those voters as an independent candidate, but he has firmly ruled out a third party bid.

“As it now stands, both Gore and Bush have their work cut out for them to appeal to these people,” says John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron.

Conflicted Public Creates Difficulties

If, as now seems certain, Bush and Gore meet in the fall, that points toward a closely competitive and potentially volatile general election--as the two competitors try to navigate the conflicting impulses of a public largely content with the country’s direction but dissatisfied with the tenor and style of politics in Washington.

Each man has already signaled that he will play on one side of that equation, with Gore arguing that it is “risky” to veer from the policies associated with economic prosperity, and Bush offering himself as the antidote to scandal and “eight years of partisanship and gridlock and division.”

“I think it stays close,” says Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, an independent polling operation. “I don’t see the basis by which one of these guys opens up a big lead unless one of them does something clearly stupid.”

The effective end of the nomination battles Tuesday set up an eight-month general election campaign that is likely to test the public’s patience for candidate arguments, media spin and television advertising. The end came so abruptly--with Gore sweeping Bradley in all 16 Democratic contests, and Bush amassing an apparently insurmountable delegate lead over McCain--that both Gore’s and Bush’s camps Wednesday were scrambling to shift their focus toward the fall.

In each party, the first question was assessing how the races in the primaries had affected the landscape for the general election.

The most obvious difference has been the narrowing of the polls. While most surveys last fall consistently gave Bush a double-digit lead over Gore, recent polls generally show the Texas governor with a low single-digit advantage, and sometimes no advantage at all.

Last September, for instance, the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed Bush leading Gore nationally by 17 percentage points; their latest survey, released earlier this week, showed the two men in a dead heat. In that survey, Gore led Bush everywhere outside the South, the bedrock of the GOP coalition.

As those numbers suggest, many political observers believe the way Bush was forced to win the GOP nomination--by stressing his conservative credentials and rallying the Republican base against McCain--have made the Texas governor, at least for now, much less attractive to swing voters than he initially looked last summer.

After beginning his campaign by emphasizing “compassionate conservatism” and his desire to reform education, Bush spent much of the last three months touting his plan for a massive across-the-board tax cut and his opposition to campaign finance reform; through controversies swirling around both Bob Jones University and televangelist Pat Robertson, Bush also became much more closely identified with the Christian conservative movement than when he started.

That repositioning helped Bush achieve a stunning feat in the primaries: He defeated McCain among Republican voters in every state except New Hampshire and Arizona, according to exit polls by The Times and Voter News Service.

The flip side, though, is that Bush showed an ominously limited appeal to the moderates and independents who loom larger in November: McCain carried both groups in every state except Georgia, according to the exit polls.

With that record in mind, senior McCain advisors now argue that Bush has rendered himself unelectable through the means he used to defeat the senator from Arizona. “Right now, Bush isn’t going to be president, no way,” insisted one top McCain aide.

That verdict may be wildly premature. Bush still has important assets he can use to reposition himself for centrist voters. In his victory speech Tuesday night, and interviews on the network morning shows Wednesday, he signaled several of them.

Most striking were two themes. One was Bush’s intention to forcefully attack Gore over the scandals that have bedeviled the Clinton administration; the second, his aggressive move to portray himself as more committed than the Democrat to reforming public education and Social Security.

That’s a gambit virtually unprecedented for a Republican nominee and a continuation of Bush’s efforts during the primary to tap into the McCain current by emphasizing policy reform, as opposed to the political process reforms stressed by the Arizona senator. “If we are going to talk about reform, it’s going to be on issues like these,” said one senior Bush advisor.

Bush’s moves to the right during the primary found some parallel in Gore’s moves to the left: the vice president called for allowing gays to serve openly in the military, refused to directly criticize controversial civil rights leader Al Sharpton and said he would consider raising cigarette taxes to fund health care for the uninsured. But most observers agree that Gore, who faced an ultimately weaker challenge, did not have to move as far from the center in the primaries as Bush.

“There’s been a more marked shift in the ideological positioning of Bush than there has been of Gore, for sure,” said Republican strategist Kieran Mahoney.

Yet if Gore didn’t create many new problems for himself in dispatching Bradley, analysts generally question whether he made much progress in resolving the personal doubts he faces among swing voters, in particular the reform constituency drawn toward McCain.

In his appearances Tuesday and Wednesday, Gore revealed his intention to initially court swing voters with three broad arguments--an effort to portray Bush as more conservative than they think on issues such as gun control and abortion; a promise to pursue a campaign finance reform agenda more sweeping than McCain’s; and above all, an intention to portray Bush’s tax cut as a threat to the nation’s booming economy.

New arguments inevitably will join and recast these first notes in this marathon general election. But whatever else Americans hear from the two candidates this summer and fall, it’s a good bet they will hear Bush portray Gore as the embodiment of an unacceptable moral and ethical status quo in the capitol, and Gore paint Bush as a risk to the prosperity and progress on issues such as crime and welfare that have increased public satisfaction with the nation’s direction to historic levels.

Framed between those arguments, the general election may turn on whether Americans are more eager to change Washington’s political leadership--or to maintain the policies associated with the nation’s long boom.

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Times political writer Cathleen Decker contributed to this story.

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CONCESSION STANDS

McCain and Bradley plan announcements today as Bush, Gore look to November. A16