Latest Polls Buoy Gore Camp as Race Finds New Focus

NASHVILLE —  Al Gore, wearing a boyish, just-plain-silly grin, bounded down the aisle of Air Force Two this week to show off his latest trophy: a battery-powered plastic bass that, with the press of a button, sang a slightly tinny version of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

One reason for Gore’s good spirits: a spate of opinion polls showing that the Democratic vice president has nearly closed the gap with his Republican rival, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.

After two months of surveys that seemed to show Bush cementing a strong lead, the presidential election now appears almost a dead heat.

A CBS News poll released this week, for example, found 43% of the public supporting Bush and 41% for Gore, a difference smaller than the survey’s margin of error of 4 percentage points. Other national polls have found a similar narrowing of the gap between the two presumed major-party candidates.

Pollsters say the numbers reflect two basic facts about this year’s presidential election: The outcome is still up for grabs and, because most voters aren’t paying close attention yet, it may remain that way for a long time.

“People haven’t made up their minds,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan group. “They are paying less attention than they did four years ago. That makes the numbers volatile and the outcome unpredictable.”

Democratic pollster Peter Hart agreed. “Each candidate still has an awful lot to prove to the electorate. They both still have a long way to go.”

But the short-term trend, several pollsters said, has been an improvement for Gore--based partly on a burst of effective campaigning during the past month (and partly on the fading of news about Gore’s role in the 1996 Democratic campaign finance scandals, which drove his numbers down in June).

Gore Pushes to Define Bush by His Record

Gore and his aides, not surprisingly, credit their campaign themes for the shift.

“People are responding to the message of prosperity and progress,” Gore said in an interview. “Something is changing out there.”

He maintained, as he long has, that he doesn’t put much store in the polls but later added jokingly, “They seem to be becoming more significant.”

Gore aides suggested that the race has changed because of the vice president’s double-barreled message: half-positive, half-negative. The positive side has been an old-fashioned populist war cry--”For the people, not for the powerful”--to rally traditional Democrats. The negative side has been a growing drumbeat of attacks on Bush’s record as governor of Texas.

“People don’t know that much about George W. Bush,” Gore spokesman Chris Lehane said. “Most people think about him as the son of the former president.”

In place of that gauzy, generally positive image, Gore has sought to portray Bush as “a former Big Oil executive” who misspent his state’s budget surplus on “tax cuts for the special interests.”

The Bush camp has responded in kind, charging Gore with distorting the record (Bush ran a small oil company, and the largest portion of his state tax cut was for property tax relief) and asserting that the tactic won’t work.

“It won’t be long before Al Gore accuses Gov. Bush of causing tooth decay,” scoffed Ari Fleischer, a Bush spokesman. “People see through this kind of old-style attack-dog politics.”

Fleischer said the GOP campaign believes Bush’s lead in the polls is secure, although he acknowledged that the race may tighten. “We still expect it to be a close race,” he said. “We anticipate as a natural event that some Democrats will come home. But that’s got nothing to do with anything Al Gore says or does.”

Several pollsters disagreed. They said Bush opened a lead in May and June largely by persuading independent voters and some Democrats to think of him as a new-generation centrist conservative. But in the last four weeks, Gore’s public campaigning and television advertising seem to have had some effect.

“Gore’s been spending a huge amount of money on television ads . . . and they’re quite good ads,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said. “It’s natural that you’d see some Democrats returning to their base, deciding that even if they don’t love Al Gore, they aren’t ready to vote for a Republican.”

Democratic pollster Peter Hart agreed. “It’s the Bush vote that has tended to go up and down; the Gore vote has tended to remain pretty steady around the 40% level.” The variation, he said, stemmed from Democrats and independents flirting with the idea of voting for Bush, but then having second thoughts.

Winning Issues Vs. Winning Personality

Several pollsters pointed to a striking contrast: Most voters say they prefer Gore’s positions on issues they consider important, such as health care, education and Social Security. But a majority of the same voters say they find Bush a more effective leader who can “get things done.”

“Al Gore has to show that he’s his own man, with his own agenda, and that people can see him as likable,” Hart said. “I just don’t think he can win the presidency unless a lot more people think positively of him.”

In contrast, he said, “George W. Bush has all the personal skills he needs. The difficulty for him is that voters are unsure about his competence: Is he ready for the job?”

That race between Gore’s winning issues and Bush’s winning personality has produced this year’s version of the long-running “gender gap,” said Kohut of the Pew Center. “Women tend to support Gore because they like his stand on the issues. Men tend to support Bush because of his leadership ability. What’s happened during the past few weeks is this: Men stick with Bush and don’t go to Gore. Women keep vacillating back and forth between giving Bush a big lead and giving him no lead.”

But the most striking trend, all the pollsters said, is the low level of voter interest in the contest.

“A lot of people say it doesn’t matter who wins,” Kohut said. “Fewer people think it’s all that important than ever before.” A Pew survey released last week found that 46% of voters said they had given the election much thought, compared with 55% at about the same point in 1996 and 63% in 1992.

Both campaigns hope to build more voter interest beginning with their parties’ nominating conventions in August, the Republicans’ in Philadelphia and the Democrats’ in Los Angeles.

And then, since their positions on the issues are fairly set, both sides say they plan to focus the debate on which candidate would make the better leader.

“If this becomes a fight between Gov. Bush’s stewardship in Texas and Al Gore’s leadership in Washington, it’s over,” said Bush spokesman Fleischer. “That’s a clear winner for Gov. Bush.”

Not at all, insisted Gore spokesman Mark D. Fabiani. “Ever since we focused on high gas prices and the character of George W. Bush as a former oil man, they’ve been on the defensive,” he said. “George W. Bush has never done well under pressure . . . and we’re going to keep the pressure up.”

Fabiani and other Gore aides cheerfully compare their campaign to paint Texas as a benighted place of substandard air quality, education and health care to a similar gambit that Bush’s father, then-Vice President George Bush, used in 1988.

After that year’s Democratic candidate, Michael S. Dukakis, boasted of his record as governor of Massachusetts, the elder Bush led reporters on a tour of polluted sites in Boston Harbor.

“Gov. Bush’s father showed how the strategy can work,” Fabiani said. “He didn’t attack Massachusetts as a state; he attacked his opponent’s record on specific issues.”

Aides noted that Gore doesn’t need to win every argument over Bush’s record to gain ground; he merely needs to make the governor’s record controversial.

Pollster Kohut said the strategy probably makes good political sense.

“Gore can’t afford to allow Bush to appear to have strong leadership abilities and a good record,” he said. “That’s the key to the campaign. He can’t allow people to develop confidence in Bush’s leadership.

“The risk is that he’s going to sound too negative and turn people off,” he said. “But he hasn’t reached that point yet. Voters generally don’t resent attacks on a candidate’s record in office.”