Early Primaries Feature Candidate Role Reversals

If anyone wanted to make a movie about the first stages of the 1992 presidential race, the title would be a natural: Switch.

In both parties, dramatic role reversals are driving the early primary contests, an analysis of exit polls and election results suggest. Key actors in each drama are playing parts that are virtually the opposite of what their strategists had anticipated.

In the Republican contest, President Bush--who, like Ronald Reagan before him, ran much better among men than women in his drive to the White House--is now depending on women’s votes to contain conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan’s pugnacious challenge.

Adding to the irony is a second role reversal: Buchanan is posting his strong numbers in part by pummeling Bush with the same kind of issues--primarily race and taxes--with which the President battered Democrat Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. And, like Dukakis, Bush has appeared uncertain how to respond, many Republican strategist say.

In these ways, the 1992 Republican race is increasingly resembling the 1988 general election--only with Buchanan playing the role of Bush, and Bush uncomfortably emulating Dukakis. “It’s like one of our lab rats has escaped and is biting our leader with a deadly virus that we developed to use against someone else,” says one of the Bush campaign’s senior strategists.

In the Democratic contest, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton had expected to run as the “new” Democrat against a party traditionalist like Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin or New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. But former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas’ striking success in attracting independent suburbanites has forced Clinton to remake himself into the choice of the party’s traditional constituencies--minorities, poor people and working-class voters--as well as “Reagan Democrats” who have bolted the party in recent campaigns.

This shift echoes through the candidate’s message. Clinton began his campaign stressing themes aimed largely at suburbia--fiscal responsibility, “reinventing government,” and demanding greater “personal responsibility” from the recipients of government aid; but now, as he tries to isolate Tsongas as the choice of the affluent, Clinton has turned up the volume on a populist message of economic fairness.

To an increasing degree, Clinton is running against Tsongas the campaign he expected Harkin to run against him. And, from the other side, Tsongas faces an unexpected challenge for upscale environmentalist votes from former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. who has lashed him for his support of nuclear power.

This intricate maneuvering on message and strategy is a sign of ideological turbulence in both parties, as Democrats duel over how best to expand their base, and Republicans feud over how to hold onto theirs.

Buchanan’s campaign draws its strength in part, from the tensions between two key components already within the traditional Republican constituency: younger, affluent, socially tolerant suburbanites, and older, less affluent cultural conservatives. Many Republicans fear that Buchanan’s challenge is exacerbating those divisions, by forcing to the forefront polarizing issues like abortion, affirmative action, and trade.

“There is a fault line within the Republican Party--and Pat Buchanan is jumping up and down on it every day,” says one GOP pollster.

The key question in the Democratic race, by contrast, is how to best exploit that Republican division. Tsongas and Clinton are battling over how to enlarge the Democratic base, with Tsongas targeting the suburban vote, and Clinton, perhaps reluctantly, focusing his efforts on the culturally conservative Reagan Democrats.

“The bottom line,” says Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, “is that Democrats are reaching for ways to communicate to a larger coalition and the Republicans are trying to get people who have supported them not to revolt against their President.” It is difficult to say which party’s presidential race contains more vivid ironies.

In the 1988 campaign, Bush overtook Dukakis with a devastating array of polarizing issues that portrayed the Democrat as a cultural elitist. Among the sharpest were taxes, capital punishment, and the subtle inflammation of racial tensions through attacks on Dukakis’ prison furlough program.

Once in office, many critics felt, Bush continued to exploit barely veiled racial imagery by repeatedly denouncing proposed civil rights legislation as a “quota” bill--before finally signing the measure last fall, when opponents accused him of abetting the political rise of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

Now, Buchanan has turned Bush’s tactic on him with a vengeance. His ads hammer the President for reversing himself to sign “the quota bill” and abandoning his promise not to raise taxes.

“Bush is being hoisted on his own petard, because he tried to have it both ways: running on wedge issues in campaign years and then trying to govern in the center in between,” says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with moderate Democrats.

Though broad-based discontent with the nation’s general direction has been the key to Buchanan’s success, the “wedge” tactics are also helping him. In Georgia, just 10% of Republican primary voters said affirmative action was a major factor in their vote--but that segment backed Buchanan by 64% to 36%, according to a Los Angeles Times exit poll. Fully one-fourth of the primary electorate, though, cited Bush’s reversal on taxes as a major factor; they endorsed Buchanan by 98% to 2%.

Bush’s campaign has responded with a blend of traditional Republican and Democratic tactics. From the GOP playbook, they pulled out ads challenging Buchanan’s fitness to serve as commander in chief, citing his opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf. That did not seem to have much effect: About one-third of the Republican primary electorate were veterans, and even they gave Buchanan a slightly greater share of their vote than the rest of the public.

More effective was the borrowing of a traditional Democratic gambit: targeting the gender gap. Consider the irony: Throughout his presidency, Bush has been viewed with suspicion by many Republican women because of his opposition to legalized abortion, and just four months ago he faced a virtual revolt from some over the Anita Faye Hill-Clarence Thomas imbroglio.

But in Georgia, Bush ran ads attacking his rival as insensitive to women’s concerns. That reflects the President’s dilemma: His primary base is now largely female. While men split narrowly toward him, women gave him two-thirds of their vote in Georgia and New Hampshire.

The demographic lines emerging in the Democratic contests are equally sharp--and ironic. The races in New Hampshire, Maryland, Georgia and Colorado have all followed the same pattern: Tsongas has run best among upper-income professionals with Clinton drawing the most votes from high school graduates, blue-collar workers and the lower middle-class. In Georgia and Maryland, Clinton added minorities to the mix.

The allegations of marital infidelity and the controversy over his Vietnam-era draft status appear to have hurt Clinton more with upscale voters than any other group, diminishing his ability to reach them with his calls for party change.

This dynamic has forced Clinton to retool his approach. His message always contained a populist element--he took swipes at corporate executives who lavished themselves with excessive salaries--but that was subsumed to a broader critique of “brain-dead politics in both parties.” Now, as Clinton has lost the allegiance of better-educated voters who might warm to that cerebral theme, populist appeals to economic fairness--such as his proposal to cut middle-class taxes--have assumed center stage.

Originally for Clinton, “fairness was incidental,” says Stanley B. Greenberg, his pollster. “But New Hampshire narrowed the message. And Tsongas has been effective in narrowing it further: He has delivered a message that’s very effective with upscale voters.”

For all his success with those voters, Tsongas now faces two threats. First, the Colorado results suggest that an invigorated Brown may peel off some of Tsongas’ upscale support: In Colorado, Brown ran evenly with Tsongas among college graduates, according to the Voter Research and Survey exit polls.

Even more important, that suburban professional vote diminishes in importance over the next month of contests. The three states in which Tsongas has won primaries--New Hampshire, Maryland, and Utah--all have a higher percentage of college graduates than the national average.

But most of the Southern and border states that vote over the next week have a smaller share of college graduates than the national average; only Texas and Missouri even reach the average. In such major industrial battlegrounds as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, the share of college graduates is also well below the national average; only New York and Illinois are around the national mean.

All that suggests if Clinton can hold the blue-collar and minority vote he has amassed so far--and no new revelations scar his campaign--the demographics favor him over the next several weeks, unless Tsongas successfully reaches out to working-class voters. Clinton could also be hurt if Brown can attract more blue-collar votes with his own brand of populism or Harkin revives his campaign enough to compete for union members in Michigan and Illinois.

Absent those possibilities, if the pattern established so far holds up, the 1984 race may present a revealing analogy: It is as if Tsongas is winning the Gary Hart vote, but ceding to Clinton most of the votes that went to Walter F. Mondale and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In most states that latter combination is comfortably sufficient for victory. Which may be why Bill Clinton, who once seemed the inheritor of the new politics label, is beginning to sound less like Hart and more like Mondale.