The Race in Key Places

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

GEORGE BUSH IS A CREATURE OF the suburbs. He was born in a residential enclave south of Boston, reared in a leafy bedroom community north of New York City and made his first leap into politics in the 1960s from the fast-growing neighborhoods northwest of Houston. In 1988 he ran hard for the suburban vote and won most of it. As his longtime pollster Robert Teeter once put it, "Without the suburbs, we wouldn't have won."

But many of the same regions that pushed Bush over the top four years ago are far cooler to his candidacy today. A TIME poll of five swing suburban counties in five battleground states -- counties where Bush must win or at least remain competitive -- spells trouble for the President: in all but one, Bush is trailing Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton by larger-than-expected margins. While Clinton holds a 6-point lead among likely voters nationwide, he is ahead by roughly twice that margin in most of these battleground counties. "If this keeps up," says a senior adviser to the Republican campaign, "it may be too late."

That's probably an overstatement, but it is striking that Bush is trailing where he and his party have traditionally been strongest. In five of the past six elections, Republicans won the White House in large part because they enjoyed lopsided support from voters who fled the troubled cities in search of a safer and more comfortable life. As the suburbs have mushroomed in California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania, so has the Republican grip on those states' electoral votes. In 1980 and 1984, Republicans under Ronald Reagan rolled up big enough margins among the country-club set, right-wing Republicans and conservative Democrats to overcome easily traditional Democratic strength inside large cities.

George Bush tried to repeat the Republican formula in 1988 but found it harder than he expected. Unable to capture more than half the pivotal Reagan Democrats, who had suffered from industrial layoffs and distrusted his patrician background, Bush compensated by reaching deep into a new group of voters known as "suburban independents." Making up about 20% of the electorate, this group was younger and more moderate than the Reagan Democrats on social issues such as abortion, race and the environment. But these independents were more conservative on economic issues, such as taxes and federal spending. They worked in white-collar jobs and, because they had prospered under Reagan, appreciated Bush's risk-averse, steady-as-she-goes approach. Wooing them relentlessly with both his "no new taxes" and "kinder, gentler" themes, Bush won 3 of every 5 of these voters in 1988.

But those margins -- at least at the moment -- aren't materializing again for the Republicans. The suburban independents who once believed they were immune to the ups and downs of the economy are now deeply worried about their future. Many have been hit by layoffs, seen the value of their homes fall or realized that the new towns to which they fled provide no escape from crime, drugs or traffic-clotted commutes. Four out of 5 such voters surveyed by TIME believe their region is still in a recession. Having abandoned the Democratic Party for economic reasons in the 1980s, they are now poised to return. "The people in the suburbs have just been hammered by the recession," explains Mark Baldassare, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Irvine. "They're blaming Bush for not keeping the economy going smoothly and providing jobs."

Consider St. Louis County, Missouri, a populous cluster of Republican- leaning suburbs outside the city of St. Louis that Bush won by 10 points in 1988. Voters' doubts about the future of the large local auto-parts and defense industries have helped put Clinton ahead of Bush by 11 points today. That the gap exists in an area that Republicans normally rely on to produce large margins to make up for Democratic strength elsewhere in the Show Me state underscores Bush's dilemma. Notes Joyce Aboussie, a longtime Democratic organizer for Congressman Dick Gephardt: "If the Republicans don't carry St. Louis County by 10 points, they have a big problem."

The prognosis for Bush is even worse in Middlesex County, New Jersey, where g.o.p. state director Bill Palatucci warns, "You've got to play the Democrats to a draw, or you're dead" statewide. Located 20 miles southwest of New York City and extending almost to Princeton, Middlesex is home to large numbers of both older Reagan Democrats and younger suburban independents. At the moment, 69% of the county's voters say the economy is the "main problem" the candidates should be addressing in the campaign. Though Middlesex is the most affluent of the five counties surveyed -- the median household income is $48,760 -- it also suffers from an 8.1% unemployment rate, the highest in any of the five counties. In 1988 Middlesex gave Bush a 10-point margin of victory; today Bush is trailing Clinton by 13 points. But the Democrats aren't taking it for granted: Clinton's state headquarters is in New Brunswick, in the heart of Middlesex, and Clinton's top operative, Rich Gannon, purposefully launched his first door-to-door canvassing there. Last week Hillary Clinton appeared at two events in Middlesex. "If we can break even with these voters," said Stan Greenberg, Clinton's pollster, "we'll be able to declare victory in November."

Worries about the economy are on the verge of putting some California suburbs -- and probably the state -- out of Bush's reach. In 1988 Dukakis won high-growth Contra Costa County, across the bay from San Francisco, with a 3- point margin. Mary Wilson, who manages the Bush campaign in the state, says ; the county is a "good snapshot of California" because it includes "pockets of Republicans, minorities, suburban yuppies, growth industries, agriculture and blue-collar jobs." Wilson notes that Republican candidates typically run 6 to 7 points ahead of Republican registration, which is around 45%. But while both Bush and Clinton visited Contra Costa in July, the Arkansas Governor is currently ahead there by a stunning 28 points.

Even in De Kalb County, Georgia, where unemployment hovers below the national average at 6.3%, Bush faces a formidable challenge. Nestled east of Atlanta, De Kalb provided the backdrop to the movie Driving Miss Daisy, and is home to a diverse mix of rich and poor, white and black, Republican and Democrat, as well as longtime residents and new immigrants from the North. Dukakis narrowly won De Kalb with 50.2% of the vote in 1988; at the moment, Bush trails Clinton by a daunting 23%.

The results from De Kalb reveal how frayed Bush's coalition has become. In this suburb more than 90% of registered Democrats say they expect to stick with the party's standard-bearer in November. Additionally, about 11% of local registered Republicans and 46% of De Kalb's independents say they are leaning toward Clinton. Among voters ages 18 to 34, traditionally one of Bush's strongest constituencies, Clinton is leading 62% to Bush's 28%. Among women, Clinton captures 63% of likely voters.

But if many of these voters seem to have given up on Bush, they aren't all sold on Clinton. In closely fought Montgomery County, Ohio, an area that incorporates Dayton, Bush is in a statistical dead heat with Clinton and would win in a three-way contest with Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot, who remains on the ballot in Ohio. When voters who were leaning toward Bush are added to the mix, the President wins the county by 7 points. Such support for the incumbent ensures that Ohio will be one of the closest contests this fall. The Buckeye State, admits Clinton's field marshal Mark Longabaugh, is "going to be bare knuckles to the end."

Bush is beginning to fight back, painting Clinton as a dangerous taxer and spender who will raise the deficit, a problem suburbanites regard as acute. In a speech in Union City, New Jersey, five days after the Houston convention, Bush said, "The big point I want to make in this working state is high spending and higher taxes will not do any favors to the American worker." Though Bush helped to almost double the deficit in four years, his antitax , message, says g.o.p. state director Palatucci, "is one that we're going to make over and over again. The contrast on taxes is what's giving us our legs right now."

Bush visited a siren-exporting factory in the suburbs of St. Louis two weeks ago and warned voters there that Clinton would place a tax on foreign investment. "This taxing," Bush said, "will literally destroy jobs, discourage investment and threaten to start an economic war just as markets the world over are opening up to American products." Anxious to cleave away some of Clinton's support among Missouri's independents, Bush met for 20 minutes with four of Perot's top backers in the state after he gave the speech. All four endorsed the President the next day in a three-city fly- around arranged by the Bush campaign.

Last week, at a considerable premium in cost, Clinton's aides rushed a new 60-second commercial onto the airwaves in nine states (Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Louisiana, North Carolina, Connecticut, Kentucky, New Mexico and Colorado) in an attempt to win over fence-sitters before Bush's antitax argument gelled. "Something's happening," says a disembodied voice as images of elderly white and black women trip across the screen. "People are ready. Because they've had enough. Enough of seeing their incomes fall behind and their jobs on the line."

Bush still has some reserves of support to draw on: more than half of suburban independents say they have a favorable impression of him personally, and equal numbers report they would "be proud to have him as President." But they disapprove of his handling of his job in numbers 5 to 10 points higher than does the population as a whole. Nor does Bush's Trumanesque attack on the Democratic Congress appear to have much purchase with swing voters. While most suburbanites blame Democrats in Congress more than Bush for the economic problems in their local area, they also plan to vote for the Democratic congressional candidate in their district.

The TIME poll illuminates why the family-values theme Bush and his campaign chieftains advanced at the Republican Convention backfired with many suburban voters. Bush's aides pumped up the family-values souffle in part to keep the party's rebellious right wing on board. But that lurch to the right seems to have alienated the center: while 60% of the voters in the five counties worry most about the economy, only 5% see "family values" as the main problem facing the nation -- an imbalance that helps explain why Bush's aides announced two weeks ago that they would turn down the volume on family values. "By and large," noted U.C. Irvine's Baldassare, "suburban voters are pragmatic Republicans who are more interested in what George Bush is saying about the economy and the deficit than in family values or abortion."

The result is that Bush is having more difficulty in 1992 holding his base while reaching out to the middle. His pollsters were dismayed to discover after the Houston convention that only his acceptance-speech attack on trial lawyers had any resonance with swing voters. Otherwise, the umbrella issues of crime and patriotic pride, which he hoped would appeal to both the right and the swing vote, are falling on dead ears.

Bush's central message at the moment seems to lie in his grim warning that as bad as things are now, Clinton could make them worse. That Bush must resort to such fearmongering suggests how much harder a time he is having holding his coalition together today than he did four years ago. Bush might as well have been describing his own campaign when he accused Clinton two weeks ago of trying to "exploit the darker impulses of this uncertain age -- fear of the future, fear of the unknown . . ."

Clinton aides see in Bush's recent travel schedule hints that the g.o.p. may have begun to focus its attention on the South and Midwest at the expense of the West Coast. Bush aides retort that the President canceled a planned Western swing only because of Hurricane Andrew and spent Labor Day weekend on a pancakes-and-polka tour through the Midwest. Even if Bush is ready to write off the Golden State, notes John Emerson, Clinton's California director, he doesn't have to decide now. "Because most of California is media," said Emerson, "you don't have to make decisions until a few weeks out."

Nonetheless, electoral-map strategists from both parties already see the distinct possibility that the Republicans may soon be forced to choose their targets from a much smaller base of states than they are accustomed to in order to compile the 270 electoral votes needed to win. For years Republican strength in the South and the West meant that the Democrats had to scrape together 270 electoral votes from a much narrower band of states in the North and the East. Former Republican chairman Lee Atwater liked to say that the Democrats' odds of threading that needle were about as good as "pulling to an inside straight" in poker.

Now the tables may be turning. If Bush's showing in the suburb-rich battleground states is any indication, it may be the Republicans who have to draw to an inside straight in order to win this year.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Little Rock, Tom Curry/New York and Dan Goodgame/Washington