Startling Surge for Carter

If the presidential election were held now, Jimmy Carter would defeat Gerald Ford by 48% to 38% of the vote. Just seven weeks ago, after the Florida primary, Ford would have beaten Carter, 46% to 38%. The extraordinary shift in voter sentiment was a stunning measure of how far the Georgian had come by last week, just after his Pennsylvania victory.

By 50% to 27%, moreover, U.S. voters want to see a Democrat elected as the next President, provided both candidates are of equal stature and competence. Voters--Republicans, Democrats and Independents--consider Carter the strongest possible Democratic candidate: 48% see Carter that way, v. 34% for Humphrey and 3% for Jackson. At the same time, Americans split evenly, 41% to 41%, with 19% uncertain, on whether the Democrat or the Republican will win in November.

These are the principal findings of a poll conducted for TIME last week by Yankelovich, Skelly and White, Inc., the opinion-research firm. The results were gathered in telephone interviews with a representative, national sample of 1,011 registered voters in the two days immediately following the Pennsylvania primary. Most of the interviews were taken before Humphrey announced he would not actively campaign and all of them before Jackson dropped out, so that, if anything, the poll may underestimate Carter's strengths.

The poll also indicates that there is still some vulnerability in Carter's position. Even with Pennsylvania behind him, Carter was the choice of a minority of his own party (39%, v. 59% for some other candidate). If they were voting on the basis of economic, defense and foreign policy issues alone, more Democrats would prefer Humphrey over Carter.

Still, the pace of Carter's ascendancy has been breathtaking. Before the New Hampshire primary, he was unknown to 55% of the electorate; now he is known to 82% and viewed as accept able by 59%. Based on answers from the people who were polled, the Carter phenomenon seems the result of two factors: 1) the hunger for a Democratic candidate who can win in November and 2) the search for an indefinable quality of moral leadership at a time when 61% of the respondents feel something is morally wrong in the nation. That search for moral leadership promises to be Carter's strongest asset against Ford. Of those voters who feel something is morally wrong in the nation, 54% said they would vote for Carter in November, while 31% would support Ford. Another factor in Carter's favor is the extraordinary attention voters are paying this year to "the man" rather than the issues.

Two potential stumbling blocks forCarter--issues that seemed likely to make voters uneasy--have not materialized. Despite the brief uproar over his "ethnic purity"remarks, a strong 62% of the voters regard him as a fair person on racial issues. And 50% of the voters do not consider Carter's intense religious convictions a factor in the election; 32% believe such views are an asset; only 8% are worried by them.

On the Republican side, Gerald Ford has steadily improved his position against Ronald Reagan. Among Republicans and Independents, Ford is now the choice of 62%, v. 25% for Reagan. Seven weeks ago, it was Ford 56%, Reagan 28%. Among all voters, confidence in Ford's handling of two basic policy is sues is reasonably strong. Almost three out of four voice some or a lot of confidence in his management of the economy and inflation. Two out of three express some or a lot of confidence in his conduct of foreign affairs. At the same time, the Reagan campaign has been hurting Ford by generating concern about U.S. military power compared with Russia's. One out of two voters are worried about the state of U.S. military power and consider it a major issue.

With Carter running strong on "moral leadership" and Reagan chipping away at Ford on the defense issue, the President becomes increasingly dependent on an improved economy as his greatest strength. But while the economy is gaining, voters perceive the rate of progress as slowing. The share of people who say they feel economic stress --worry about paying off bills or losing jobs--dropped from a high of 36% last June to 30% in October; since then, the index has shown no real improvement. Last week it stood at 29%.

On the brighter side, last October little more than one-third of the voters said that things were going well in the country. Now, for the first time since the TIME-Yankelovich polls started two years ago, more than half the people (53%) share that belief. That may work in Ford's favor. Among those who share this optimism, 48% would vote for him and only 39% for Carter.

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