Bush Leading Gore as Democratic Base Falters

Erasing the recent Democratic advantage among women and dominating among men, Republican George W. Bush has opened an imposing 8-percentage-point nationwide lead over Democrat Al Gore, a new Times Poll has found.

Six months before the presidential election, the poll finds Bush, the presumptive Republican nominee, establishing a broad initial base of support. At an unusually early point, the Texas governor has virtually unified the Republican base, even as he’s reaching successfully into swing voter groups that proved crucial to President Clinton’s two victories.

Perhaps most strikingly, Bush is reestablishing a traditional Republican advantage among married voters that Clinton largely neutralized. Married voters, who tend to be more conservative on social issues, now prefer Bush over Gore, the presumptive Democratic nominee, by a commanding 21-percentage-point margin. Bush is leading decisively not only with married men but also married women.

Bush’s strength among married women is offsetting Gore’s hold on single women and allowing the Texan to run step-for-step with the vice president among women overall, eliminating a solid Democratic advantage in the last two presidential elections. If Bush can maintain anything near parity with women, it would put Gore at great risk, because the Republican is displaying enormous appeal for male voters, even Democratic men.

Overall, the poll found, Bush now leads Gore among registered voters by 51% to 43%, with 5% saying they don’t know. The result doesn’t change much when Ralph Nader, the liberal Green Party nominee, and Patrick J. Buchanan, the conservative tribune likely to head the Reform Party ticket, are added to the mix.

In that match-up, Bush draws 47% to 39% for Gore, with Nader at 4% and Buchanan at 3%. In either case, Bush’s 8-percentage-point advantage is a larger lead than most other recent national surveys have found for the Texan.

The Times Poll, supervised by Polling Director Susan Pinkus, surveyed 1,211 registered voters May 4-7; it has margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

With both campaigns agreeing that many voters still hold only fleeting impressions of the two leading contenders, these results may prove fluid. Gore supporters often point out that at this point in 1988, then-Vice President George Bush faced an even larger deficit against Democrat Michael S. Dukakis yet recovered to win handily.

Yet these results pinpoint the challenge facing Gore: While making progress at portraying himself as a centrist, Bush appears to be reassembling elements of the electoral coalition that allowed the GOP to win five of the six presidential elections before Clinton.

“Clinton had a lot of things going for him in a reelection in 1996 . . . and I think the patterns you are looking at now are more normal in terms of the strengths of the two parties in these groups,” says Bush pollster Fred Steeper. “It’s returning to more of its normal positioning.”

Gore, meanwhile, does not appear to be benefiting as much as he’ll need to from satisfaction with the economy and voter reluctance to significantly depart from the economic course Clinton has set.

From virtually every angle, the poll shows strength for Bush. One measure is the breadth of his appeal.

Bush leads Gore among every age group except voters 65 and older, who narrowly prefer the vice president. Bush leads Gore among every income group except middle-class families earning from $20,000 to $40,000, who tilt narrowly toward the Democrat. Likewise, Bush now leads Gore among voters at every level of education; even voters with only a high school degree or less, usually the most reliably Democratic group, prefer Bush.

In a sharp contrast to the previous two GOP nominees--his father, George Bush, in 1992, and Bob Dole in 1996--the Texas governor is also showing substantial appeal to both women and men. At this early point, Bush is drawing men like a two-for-one beer night at the corner pub. Indeed, compared to Clinton’s showing in The Times’ exit poll of the 1996 election, Gore has lost more ground among men than women in the new survey.

Among men overall, Bush leads Gore by a gaping 55% to 39%; Bush is even attracting about one-fifth of Democratic men.

Republicans typically run better with men than women. But Bush’s lead harkens back to the towering advantages among men that characterized the victories of presidents Reagan and Bush during the 1980s.

Neither side is exactly sure why Bush is running so well with men, though explanations include doubts about Gore’s leadership, Clinton’s persistently lower approval rating among men and more sympathy for Bush’s position on issues such as gun control.

Bush’s showing among women has a back-to-the-future feel as well. Though his advantage isn’t as big as Clinton’s in 1996, Gore continues to hold a double-digit lead among single women, whose economic insecurity and liberal views on social issues have combined to make them one of the electorate’s most reliably Democratic blocs.

But just as Republican nominees did in the 1970s and 1980s, Bush is offsetting that lead with a strong performance among married women, who comprise fully two-thirds of the female electorate. Bush leads Gore by at least 14 percentage points among both all married women and married women with children, the poll found.

By contrast, in 1996 Clinton narrowly carried married women--the fabled “soccer moms”--with an agenda that emphasized such “tools for parents” as the V-chip to screen television shows and regulation of tobacco advertising aimed at children. This year, most analysts attribute Bush’s strength partly to his emphasis on education.

But strategists in both the Gore and Bush campaigns agree that the governor is also benefiting from widespread anxiety among married women (especially mothers) about the nation’s culture and morals--an anxiety exacerbated by disappointment with the moral example Clinton has set. “It’s values and Clinton,” laments one senior Gore advisor.

The bottom line: The poll finds Bush drawing 48% of women, compared with 46% for Gore. In 1996, Clinton carried women by 16 percentage points, The Times’ exit poll found.

Beyond income, and education, and gender, Bush is showing a formidably broad appeal across partisan lines as well. Bush, helped by antipathy toward Clinton, has already consolidated the Republican base much earlier than Dole did. Mirroring other recent national polls, The Times’ survey found Bush already winning slightly more than 9 in 10 GOP partisans.

By contrast, Gore is losing more than 1 in 6 Democrats to Bush. Among Democrats who consider themselves moderates or conservatives, Bush’s showing rises to 1 in 5; Gore, on the other hand, is winning less than 1 in 7 moderate Republicans, a smaller group to begin with.

If the highly polarized pattern of the last several elections holds, Gore is likely to eventually reduce the Democratic defection level. Assuming Gore can ultimately corral his party members at roughly the same rate as Bush does, the race will come down to independent voters. And here the vice president is standing in an ominous early hole.

Bush leads among self-described independents overall by 16 percentage points, the poll found. Bush’s lead among independent women is almost as large as his advantage among independent men; and while winning two-thirds of independents who consider themselves conservatives, the Texan is running even with those independents who call themselves moderate and liberal.

One reason for Gore’s problems with independents is that those voters are more likely to consider Gore than Bush out of touch with their ideological values, the poll found. Nearly half of independents say they consider Gore more liberal than themselves; but only one-third now consider Bush more conservative than they are.

That question also helps explain why Bush is attracting more defectors from the other party than Gore. While 71% of Republicans consider Gore more liberal than themselves, just 45% of Democrats place Bush to their right. Those numbers underscore the stakes in Gore’s efforts to paint Bush as more conservative than he appears on issues such as taxes and Social Security.

These advantages for Bush are even more striking when set against the backdrop of the electorate’s overwhelming economic satisfaction. Despite the recent stock market turbulence, 86% of voters said the economy is doing well.

The poll also found little market for big changes from Clinton’s economic policies. Only 15% of voters say they want the next president to change those policies “a lot,” while 33% want to change “only a few specific things” and 44% want to continue in the Clinton direction. Moreover, on the fundamental economic dispute between Bush and Gore--how to allocate the federal budget surplus--the contest is no contest: 81% of voters want to use the surplus mostly to strengthen Social Security and Medicare and pay down the national debt (as Gore urges), while only 16% want a tax cut to take priority (as Bush is proposing).

Yet, for all that, when asked who could better handle the economy, Gore leads Bush by a meager 4 percentage points. When voters are asked which party could better handle the economy, the Democratic advantage is twice as large, which suggests that Gore’s showing could be a signal of broader doubts about his capacity and leadership.

There’s one more worrisome sign for the vice president in the survey. Despite the economic satisfaction, Clinton’s approval rating in the poll has sagged to 57%--still high but the lowest level The Times has found in his second term. Voters split evenly on the country’s direction, with 46% saying it is moving in the right direction, while an equal number say it is off on the wrong track.

That’s a decline since early last year in the politically sensitive “right direction” number, though the figure is still much higher than it was in fall 1992 or 1980, when Americans voted to evict the incumbent party from the White House. Gore’s larger problem is that he is not running nearly as well as he will need to among voters satisfied with the country’s direction.

While Bush is winning 62% of those who say the country is on the wrong track, Gore is winning only about half of those who believe it is on the right track. That means a significant portion of voters satisfied with the country’s direction are now voting for change, a dynamic that Gore himself will have to change if he is to overcome Bush’s early lead.

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No Mood Swings

Voters are evenly split on whether the country is going in the right direction or is off on the wrong track. This shows a slight decline in the electorate’s mood compared to last year, though the assessment remains much more positive than in 1992, the last time the incumbent party lost the White House.

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* Are things in this country generally going in the right direction or are they seriously off on the wrong track? (Among registered voters)

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* Presidential matchup: (Among registered voters)

George W. Bush: 51%

Al Gore: 43%

Don’t know: 5%

Someone else (volunteered): 1%

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* Who would do a better job of handling the economy? (Among registered voters)

Democratic Party: 45%

Republican Party: 37

Al Gore: 45%

George W. Bush: 41

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Note: Numbers may not total 100% where not all answer categories are shown.

Source: L.A. Times polls

Times Poll results are also available at https://www.latimes.com/timespoll

HOW THE POLL WAS CONDUCTED

The Times Poll contacted 1,211 registered voters nationwide by telephone May 4-7. Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in the nation. Random-digit dialing techniques were used so that listed and unlisted numbers could be contacted. The entire sample was weighted slightly to conform with census figures for sex, race, age, education and region. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. For certain subgroups the error margin may be somewhat higher. Poll results can also be affected by other factors, such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented.