Campaigns Locked in Trench Warfare in the Final Hours

As the longest presidential campaign in memory careens through its final weekend, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore still find themselves running virtually step for step across an electoral map filled with states too close to call.

Not in at least 20 years, and perhaps 40, has the result of a presidential race appeared so uncertain in the last hours before election day.

National polls give Texas Gov. Bush a narrow advantage, but Vice President Gore is still showing enough strength in key battleground states like this to retain his hope of a comeback.

Adding to the uncertainty was the unpredictable effect of last week’s revelation that Bush had been arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in 1976--and may have misled a reporter who earlier asked him whether he had ever been arrested after 1968, when he was charged with stealing a Christmas wreath as a fraternity prank.

Early polls from ABC found no effect from the story--just one Bush supporter of 700 surveyed by ABC said the news caused him to shift his vote to Gore. But whether coincidentally or not, Gore ticked up Saturday in the national tracking poll conducted for Reuters and MSNBC, cutting Bush’s lead from 4 to 2 percentage points. And with the race so close, and the information so new, some analysts felt its true effect, if any, could not be measured until election day.

Both sides were scouring poll data Saturday for any sign of a current developing that would propel one man to a decisive lead. But, in both parties, most experts don’t yet see signs that voters are poised to make the kind of decisive late break that, for instance, carried Ronald Reagan from a nail-biter to a landslide over Jimmy Carter on the campaign’s last weekend in 1980.

“There’s a drift, as opposed to a trend, in our direction over the past week,” asserted Tom Cole, chief of staff at the Republican National Committee. “I don’t see anything as dramatic as 1980. . . . Something like that could occur, but my sense is . . . it is going to go right to the end in a very close contest.”

And that means both sides will spend the campaign’s last hours locked in a form of trench warfare, scrambling for every possible advantage.

Which is why labor officials here were door-knocking for votes Saturday morning; Gore was barnstorming his home state of Tennessee on Saturday; liberal groups in the Pacific Northwest were frantically trying to push Ralph Nader supporters to Gore, and the National Rifle Assn. was firing endless volleys of phone calls into the battleground states for Bush.

Inspiring all this activity was a shared conviction encapsulated by Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: “If no outside events intervene, it will be toe-to-toe until the end, and turnout will be the thing that decides it.”

Polls Find Lead by Bush Narrowing

National polls released Saturday all showed Bush still ahead, though Newsweek as well as MSNBC-Reuters showed his margin narrowing. His lead in three surveys ranged from 2 to 4 percentage points.

What’s made this contest so distinctive is not only the narrowness of the overall national margin but also the profusion of states still legitimately in play on the campaign’s last weekend. With Bush displaying the capacity to contest Democratic-leaning turf like Iowa and Minnesota, and Gore confounding expectations by pressing Bush to the wall in Florida, the two sides were still battling this weekend for more than a dozen states at the tipping point.

Surveys released Saturday night by independent pollster John Zogby showed Bush and Gore within 2 percentage points of each other in Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Tennessee and Wisconsin. Gore led by 3 points in Washington state.

“We’ve got a lot of states that are way beyond any legitimate pollster telling you he or she knows what is going to happen,” says Republican pollster Bill McInturff.

Indeed, so many states remained within reach for either man that even optimistic scenarios constructed by some strategists on both sides have produced cliffhanger results. One senior union official privy to Democratic polling this week estimated that Gore would win 273 electoral votes--just three more than the 270 needed for victory.

Likewise, one assessment completed last week at the RNC gave Bush 287 electoral votes--and that total included Michigan, where almost all public polls last week showed Gore ahead. If Gore won Michigan’s 18 electoral votes, and all the other states followed the RNC’s projection, the two men would be tied at 269 electoral votes--throwing the race into the House of Representatives.

Some Echoes of 1888 Election

A tie, of course, remains a distant possibility. Still unlikely but less remote is the chance that Gore could narrowly lose the popular vote yet eke out an electoral college majority.

That hasn’t happened since 1888, when Democrat Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost an electoral college majority to Republican Benjamin Harrison.

Some analysts think it can’t be ruled out this year because Bush is rolling up huge margins in the South and Mountain West, while public polls show Gore even or ahead in such critical battlegrounds as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Wisconsin and Washington. Bush aides see little prospect of a split verdict because they say their private polling shows them leading in most of those states.

The most worrisome trend for Democrats was not only Bush’s consistent lead in the national polls but also the hints that Gore may face a ceiling in his support. Though Bush’s lead over Gore in the national surveys has fluctuated over the last several weeks, the vice president has rarely polled above 45% in any survey since the first presidential debate in early October.

“There has been evidence all year Gore has a ceiling,” maintains Matthew Dowd, the Bush campaign’s director of polling. “If you take out the month after the Democratic convention, he has always sat somewhere between 43% and 46% in support, and he hasn’t moved above that in any sustained way since the debates.”

Most pollsters believe that if an incumbent president (or senator or governor, for that matter) was polling only in the mid-40s so close to election day, he would be almost certain to lose because most voters undecided this late tend to vote against the incumbent. But Gore isn’t literally an incumbent, which makes the calculation more complex. “It’s not a guarantee that the undecided break against him,” says Lake.

In nine of the last 13 elections, most voters who decided in the final two weeks broke against the party holding the White House, according to University of Michigan surveys. But the history is more mixed on presidential elections without an incumbent running, the situation this year.

In 1952 and 1960, the vast majority of late-deciders broke for the nominee of the party out of the White House--Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat John F. Kennedy, respectively. But in the open-seat presidential elections of 1968 and 1988, late-deciders split almost evenly between the parties.

Given that history, Gore strategists privately acknowledge that they are unlikely to capture a majority of the remaining few voters who are undecided.

Hoping That Late Deciders Stay Home

Instead, their hope is that many of those voters either stay home or support one of the third-party candidates rather than Bush. There’s precedent for that: Ross Perot ran extremely well among late deciders in both 1992 and 1996, the University of Michigan studies found.

Gore’s advisors believe they have a better chance of overtaking Bush by recapturing some of the liberals now supporting Green Party nominee Nader. But mostly they are hoping for a big turnout of Democratic base voters that produces an electorate on Tuesday slightly more favorable to Gore than the one pollsters are now projecting. Republicans, who are working just as hard to turn out their base, remain cautiously optimistic that they can slightly increase the share of the votes cast by their partisans.

In this ground war, the two sides are battling for infinitesimal advantage--a change of a point or two in the share of the vote cast by union households or conservative Christians. Yet they are investing tens of millions of dollars in the struggle because even such small advantages this year could loom large.

“Unless the independents break decisively, they are not going to make the difference,” says the RNC’s Cole in an assessment that top Democrats echo. “It is going to be who gets their people out. Honestly, we’re not going to know that for 48 hours. It’s just a great campaign.”