Anti-Incumbent Mood Poses Big Risks for Democrats : Politics: Party is especially vulnerable because it has most to lose. Voters said to feel Clinton hasn’t delivered on sort of ‘change’ he promised.

WASHINGTON —  The anti-incumbent mood that helped put Bill Clinton in the White House last year turned against Clinton’s party Tuesday and, unless the Democrats find a way of taming it, could cause them even more problems next time, political analysts said.

Even the two national party chairmen, who, not surprisingly, disagree on most things political, expressed similar views on that point Wednesday as they interpreted the defeats of incumbent Democratic Gov. James J. Florio in New Jersey, Democratic Mayor David N. Dinkins in New York and the loss of the Democratic hold on the governor’s office in Virginia.

“I think clearly there was a mood for change last year and it was not fulfilled,” said Republican Party Chairman Haley Barbour.

“The same desire for change that we benefited from a year ago helped elect challengers” this time, said Democratic Chairman David C. Wilhelm.

The anti-incumbent mood, of course, endangers officeholders from both parties. But it is of biggest risk to the Democrats simply because they have the most to lose. Even Clinton’s top aides acknowledged that the President still must convince voters that he has delivered the sort of “change” he promised--and polls show that most Americans remain skeptical.

“The voters are not yet happy with the pace of economic renewal, social reunification in this country. They’re worried about crime and they’re worried about all these other social problems we’ve got,” Clinton told reporters Wednesday. “And I think it’s also a sense they have that government’s not yet working for them. And all that is right.

“I think that all people who are in, if they want to stay in, are going to have to work together until we produce economic results,” he said.

The biggest disappointment for the President and his strategists was Florio’s loss to Republican Christine Todd Whitman in an election that clearly turned on voter anger over the tax increases Florio pushed through after his election four years ago. Earlier this fall, when polls showed Florio winning, White House aides confidently bandied about a new phrase--”tax and mend”--to describe the strategy of raising taxes early and then convincing voters, over time, that the increases were good for them in the long run.

Florio failed to make that strategy work and Wednesday Clinton advisers could do little more than argue that the President’s tax increases had been smaller than Florio’s and had done him far less political damage--a claim that Republicans gleefully disparaged.

“Those who supported President Clinton’s largest tax increase in history are going to look to New Jersey,” Barbour said.

The election results also provided clues on voter attitudes on other important issues.

First, crime--a major issue in all three of the most closely watched races as well as mayors’ races in several other cities--and the related issue of gun control.

Republicans and the National Rifle Assn. were quick to seize on the defeat of Florio and Democrat Mary Sue Terry in Virginia, both of whom touted their gun control stands, as evidence that voters rejected the pro-gun control positions.

The assertion comes at a strategically important time because Congress is expected to vote on a bill that would impose a five-day waiting period on handgun sales and on measures to limit sales of semiautomatic weapons later this month.

In fact, however, exit polls showed that in both New Jersey and Virginia, voters who said that the gun control debate motivated them to vote split heavily in favor of the Democrats. In past elections, the gun issue has often primarily motivated gun owners.

The picture on crime was more complex. In New Jersey, voters who said that crime was one of their chief concerns split heavily in Florio’s favor. But in Virginia, such voters favored Republican George F. Allen.

Clinton’s strategists, who also were Florio’s, have been pushing him to take more aggressive stands on crime to avoid being tagged by Republicans as “soft” on the issue.

A second issue involves the power of the Christian right. Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed touted his group’s success at getting evangelical voters to show up at the polls in Virginia, claiming that nearly 40% of those who voted were evangelical Christians. “People of faith poured out of the pews and into the precincts in record numbers to make their voices heard” and provided the “margin of victory” for Republicans, Reed claimed.

The actual numbers, however, are considerably less dramatic, said Brad Coker, of Mason-Dixon Research, which conducted an exit poll of Virginia voters. While roughly 34% of white Virginia voters identified themselves in the exit poll as “born-again” Christians, that group includes many “Jimmy Carter-type Christians” who are by no means followers of Christian right leaders, such as Pat Robertson, Coker noted.

The number of people who identified themselves as “born again,” or “evangelical,” and said that a primary reason for their voting was concern over moral or religious decline was roughly 11% of the white electorate or 9% of the voters overall, Coker said. While that group voted heavily Republican, Allen, who won 58% of the vote, would have won even if they had not turned out heavily, he said.

At the same time, Michael P. Farris, a Christian conservative activist running for lieutenant governor in Virginia, was the only statewide Republican to lose. His Democratic opponent, Donald S. Beyer Jr., concentrated most of his campaign on the charge that Farris was an extremist.

“Farris lost in the highest Republican tide in Virginia in at least 20 years,” Coker said. “If he didn’t win this election, I don’t think he, or someone like him, ever could.”