Battling Over The Big Three

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It may be called a national election, but a presidential contest is really a set of 50 simultaneous state elections. And the grand prize goes to the candidate who can put together victories in the right combination of states to win the magic 270 electoral votes. In recent years, that has been easy for Republicans, given their virtual lock on the electoral votes of the South and West. But this year Michael Dukakis and George Bush start from a near standoff in the number of electoral votes represented by states solidly for them or leaning their way. So the election seems likely to be won (or lost) in a handful of battleground states, especially the Big Three of Texas, Illinois and California. Together they cast 100 electoral votes, or 37% of the total needed for victory. It is difficult to see how either candidate can gain the White House without winning at least two. And in all three, the race opens as a toss-up.

Texas

University of Houston Political Scientist Richard Murray thinks he knows what will decide the election in the Lone Star State. Says he: "The key is, Can the Democrats survive the social-issues pounding and make the economy issue stick?" That is probably the No. 1 question all over the country, but it is especially pointed in Texas. The state is highly receptive to Bush's conservative appeals on such issues as abortion, gun control, prison furloughs and the Pledge of Allegiance; in Texas rifle racks can rank with the flag as badges of honor. "If we allow that to be the agenda, we will get beat," concedes Democratic Strategist Greg Hartman.

But Texas, though beginning to recover from a severe oil, real estate and banking slump, is still depressed enough in some areas to deny Bush half of the peace-and-prosperity theme he is pushing elsewhere and to open at least some ears to Dukakis' time-for-a-change argument. While the unemployment rate has dropped to 6.8%, it is well above the national average of 5.6%. Texas continues to reel from bank closings -- 93 as of last week -- and failures of savings and loan associations. Says Luan Tatum, Democratic chair in Angelina County: "I watch the TV and hear them talking about how good things are for folks, but it's not here."

In one way, Texas is a microcosm of the whole election. The Bush and Dukakis camps readily agree that the decision of those Democrats who voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 will be crucial nationally. Texas has as many of these so-called Reagan Democrats as any other state, and like the electorate at large, they seem to be torn. For Tommy Rushing, pausing after changing a tire in his Lufkin garage, the economic issue is paramount. Says he: "I'm going to have to go with Dukakis. The Republicans don't have anything to show." About 150 miles to the west in the farm town of Hillsboro, Haberdasher James Scott is equally determined in his decision to stick with the G.O.P. His view: "Dukakis is just out of touch with Texas."

In another respect, however, Texas is certainly not typical: it is the only state to have both an adopted son (Bush) and a native son (Senator Lloyd Bentsen, Dukakis' vice-presidential nominee) on the ballot. Bentsen has so far been especially effective in reassuring Texans who worry about Dukakis' liberalism that at least one voice in the candidate's ear understands and speaks for conservative Texas social values. In addition, Bentsen brings to the ticket two powerful assets: a grass-roots organization throughout Texas' 254 counties and a pile of money. Bentsen is simultaneously running for re- election to the Senate and for Vice President. (If elected to both offices, he will resign his Senate seat.) He may spend as much as $10 million promoting his senatorial candidacy. That sum will not count against the legal limits on presidential campaign spending, but inevitably Dukakis will get at least some indirect benefit from his running mate's well-financed self-promotion.

There are whispers that Republicans may try to offset Bentsen's appeal by in effect dumping his hopeless senatorial opponent and surreptitiously urging voters to cast their ballots for Bush for President, Bentsen for Senator. Officially, though, the G.O.P. strategy is to ignore Bentsen and concentrate on painting Dukakis as a liberal outsider. Bush allies have drafted some 50 different appeals to specific groups of Texans to be banged home by local TV commercials and direct mail. In Abilene, for example, where B-1 bombers are based, the G.O.P. will charge incorrectly that Dukakis may scrap the program; messages beamed to the predominantly Roman Catholic Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley will stress Bush's opposition to abortion. Dukakis will counter by assailing the Administration's "borrow-and-spend" economics and accuse it of failing the oil-and-gas industry. He is further appealing to conservative values by blasting the Republicans' failure to win the war on drugs.

Geographically, the Republicans can count on winning the Dallas-Fort Worth area, rural West Texas and the Panhandle. Democrats hope to split Houston with the G.O.P. and roll up a huge margin in South Texas. If so, the campaign will be decided in the small towns of central and East Texas, home to the bulk of the state's 2 million swing voters, a quarter of the total. But there is a demographic codicil: the Democratic margin in South Texas' Rio Grande Valley depends heavily on retaining the loyalty of Hispanic voters, who are being assiduously courted by Bush. "Name me a Hispanic who doesn't like to hunt in South Texas," says Rancher Tony Salinas, who heads Hispanics for Bush. "Guns, abortion, patriotism -- these are cutting issues against Dukakis with Hispanics." But low-income Hispanics also respond to Dukakis' economic appeal. Furthermore, Dukakis speaks Spanish fluently. Dour as he seems to some other groups, he comes close to exuding charisma among Hispanics.

Both sides are concentrating their heaviest artillery in Texas. Republicans are recruiting a legion of 50,000 volunteers, and have already begun operating the first of 52 phone banks. Democrats have opened 30 offices across the state and made phone calls to more than a million swing voters. This month alone Bush plans to spend eight days in Texas; Dukakis and Bentsen together will match that. Moreover, the G.O.P. will bring in Reagan for at least one appearance. Says Democratic Party Director Ed Martin: "Texas is going to be an absolute war, block by block, precinct by precinct."

Illinois

Electorally, the Prairie State, like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts. First come Chicago and the other towns in Cook County, which deliver about 25% of the vote, usually overwhelmingly Democratic. Then there are the five heavily suburban "collar counties" ringing Chicago, which account for about 35% of Illinois ballots; Republicans often win them by margins wide enough to offset the Democratic edge in Chicago. And then there is "downstate," a misnomer applied to 96 counties, north, south and west, agricultural and industrial, rural and small town, where Illinois elections are often decided. Not necessarily this year though: in all three regions, some special factors are at work.

In Chicago the question is how much racial polarization and disunity among the blacks, who make up slightly more than half the city's population, will hurt the Democrats. The legendary machine that used to pile up the vote did not survive its creator, Mayor Richard Daley, who died in 1976. Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, was on the way to constructing a new machine when he died of a heart attack last fall. His successor, Acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer, has been unable to rally the same support. Chicago's black community is sharply divided on whether to back Sawyer or someone else in a possible mayoral election next year. No one expects any significant number of blacks to vote Republican, but Dukakis may suffer from the lack of a united black leadership urging its followers to get out and vote for the Democratic nominee.

On the other side, white ethnic resentment of the black takeover of city politics is embodied in Edward ("Fast Eddie") Vrdolyak, a prominent former alderman who quit the Democratic Party, charging that it "had become the place for kooks and crazies," and who now enthusiastically backs Bush. Opinions differ on how much his turnabout matters. Some Democrats regard him as a windbag with little following. But Ed Murnane, Republican director in Illinois, asserts that "Vrdolyak brought many, many voters over with him, and they are going to stay."

In the Republican collar counties, Dukakis enjoys one advantage that previous Democratic nominees did not. David Axelrod, strategist for a number of Democratic congressional campaigns, points out that Dukakis is a suburbanite and so is "comfortable with suburban voters. He thinks the way they think. He has a chance to hold the Republican margin down there." But Axelrod concedes that this will happen only if Dukakis can prevent the campaign from becoming "a liberal-conservative referendum. Dukakis is cast by the Republicans as a Carter liberal. What we need to do is to get back to one man's family, whose forebears came through Ellis Island, not on the Mayflower."

Downstate, the campaign is an uncertain face-off between Bush's stress on social issues and Dukakis' appeal to economic discontent. Illinois Democratic Director Stephen Murphy asserts that industrial cities such as Decatur, Rockford and Peoria "are the holes in the Swiss cheese. Those cities never recovered from the 1982 recession." Gregory Baise, state secretary of transportation and a liaison between Republican Governor James Thompson and the Bush staff, concedes that among Illinois farmers, already hostile to the Administration, "there's an added kicker, the drought, and we just don't know how that will work out."

! On the other hand, Bruce Cook, Democratic state central committeeman for St. Clair County, recalls a coal miner telling him that "once a guy makes $30,000 a year, he buys a riding lawn mower and votes Republican." These voters, many of them Reagan Democrats, are conservative on social issues. Cook admits that Dukakis' veto of a compulsory Pledge of Allegiance to the flag is not going to help. But he counters by asserting, "Dan Quayle really hurts Bush with these people. They are macho, patriotic people who are working really hard to send their kids to college," qualities they do not associate with Bush's running mate. In Illinois as a whole, nobody would dispute Democrat Murphy's summation, "This is a battleground state, and it is going to be close to the end."

California

During a televised debate before last June's primary, Dukakis was asked what he found distinctive about the Golden State. He replied by expounding on the universal applicability of the "Massachusetts miracle," as if he discerned little that was special about California. He seems to see it as a bigger and sunnier version of Massachusetts -- more eccentric, perhaps, but still a coastal industrial state, strong on high tech and higher education, prosperous but pocked with poverty and anxious about the future.

Bush and his advisers, not a few of whom hail from California, see a very different state: one peopled by wealthy retirees, Yuppie venture capitalists and tax-hating suburbanites, as well as socially conservative farmers and truck drivers. Their vision, like that of Dukakis, leaves out a good deal, but it probably describes more of what the state is all about. Which is why California's 47 electoral votes as of now are widely regarded as being Bush's to lose.

He could indeed lose them. In fact, at least two of Bush's top advisers predict -- strictly off the record and perhaps in a sly effort to lower expectations -- that he will. But in the past two months, Dukakis' once commanding lead in the California polls has disappeared, shrinking from 16 points to a statistically meaningless 1 point. One reason: several of the social issues Bush has been hammering on (opposition to new taxes and gun control, approval of the death penalty) have already been endorsed overwhelmingly by California voters in recent ballot initiatives. Republicans have greatly increased their registration and popularity over the past ten years. Polls show that the percentage of respondents who now consider themselves Republicans, 45%, exactly matches the percentage of those who identify themselves as Democrats. Moreover, eight years of Republican defense spending have showered benefits on California's biggest business, aerospace. Bush is courting the industry, while Dukakis talks of holding down defense outlays.

Why, then, might Bush blow it? One reason is personality. Decisive though the Vice President has appeared since the Republican Convention, Bush backers fear a relapse into the reedy-voiced, diffident aristocrat who thoroughly turned off Californians not long ago. Says Sal Russo, a Sacramento-based Republican consultant: "This state is not hospitable to a patrician candidate, and it's a potential problem having two blue bloods on the ticket." Adds a prominent Republican in the Central Valley: "The preppie image doesn't sell very well around here. Unfortunately, the reason Bush has a preppie image is that he is a preppie."

In contrast, Dukakis, despite his own aloofness, has at least a chance to come across to suburbanites, in California as in Illinois, as one of them. Says Political Consultant Hank Morris: "California is almost all suburbs, so there is a great opportunity for Dukakis to emphasize that he is the first presidential nominee to grow up in the suburbs and to stay there, commuting to work and mowing the lawn and knowing the concerns of suburbanites."

More substantively, says a Bush adviser, "the instinct for change is stronger in California than in any other state." Suburbanites may still be generally anti-tax, but their allegiance is being divided by other concerns. They are worried about haphazard commercial growth in residential neighborhoods, gridlocked traffic and parking shortages, air pollution, poor schools -- all problems that seem to call for the governmental solutions that Democrats traditionally favor and Republicans oppose.

These offsetting appeals are likely to produce about 4 million votes for Bush among registered Republicans, mostly in affluent suburbs, and an equivalent base for Dukakis among the 4 million Democrats who voted for Walter Mondale in 1984, most of whom live in big cities. The election may be decided among Democrats in the suburbs, and in the Central Valley, the richest agricultural region in the U.S. (estimated value of its vegetables, nuts, grapes and cotton: $15 billion a year). The valley is home to 1.3 million voters, many of them transplants from the Southern states, who register 3 to 2 Democratic but voted heavily for Reagan in 1980 and 1984. Says Bill Lacy, head of Bush's California campaign: "The people in the Central Valley can be appealed to like Southern conservatives, on crime, the death penalty, prison furloughs, gun control." Bush will also stress Dukakis' endorsement of a 1985 grape boycott called by United Farm Workers Leader Cesar Chavez, a stand popular with Latino farmhands, who mostly do not vote, but anathema to farm owners and their suppliers, who do.

Dukakis has been emphasizing such issues as the inability of many young couples to afford a home or reliable child care, even on two paychecks. And he is getting a friendly response from many people in the Central Valley who, like the middle class all over the country, are feeling squeezed. Michael Archer, 42, drives a scrap truck for a rendering plant, while his wife Janie works as a waitress in a coffee shop. Their three children, two boys and a girl in their 20s, are all married with children and all working at dead-end jobs: grocery clerk, bartender, waitress. "You can't raise a family on what they make," says Archer, "but those are the only kinds of jobs the kids can get around here." Archer pronounces Dukakis' name "Distakis" and admits that he knows little about the Massachusetts Governor except that "he reminds me of a Kennedy" -- and he does not intend that as a compliment. Though he and Janie voted for Reagan twice, Archer says they "most likely" will vote for Dukakis this year because "I'd like to see some kind of change."

One problem for both Dukakis and Bush is that campaigning in California, home of some of the nation's most expensive media markets, is extremely costly. Campaigns for Governor and Senator routinely cost $10 million or more per candidate. Neither presidential contender can afford to spend that much in a single state, even the nation's biggest. Dukakis and Bush are both counting on "free media." That is, they hope to stage enough colorful events to land regularly on the nightly TV news and thus get their message across to a state that is a must-win -- and a toss-up -- for both.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Fresno, Michael Riley and Richard Woodbury/Houston and Gavin Scott/ Chicago