Bush and Gore in a Dead Heat

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 2, 2000 | by Michael Rust

As the race for the presidency tightens between Gore and Bush, the two campaigns are seeking ways to draw undecided voters to their camp while avoiding any really big blunders.

Labor Day was once the traditional kickoff for the presidential campaigns. These days the permanent campaign has left the holiday in a more ambiguous position. Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush clinched the nominations of their respective parties almost six months ago, so Labor Day now seems to represent only a kind of ceremonial starting date when campaign strategies and blunders start to take on a new, sometimes ominous, meaning.

It's also the time when professional readers of entrails stop to observe a strange ritual of their own. It has become accepted (if not overly accurate) wisdom that the candidate who leads in the polls on Labor Day will win in November. Actually, this is not an infallible way to foretell political futures. The Nixon campaign of 1968 and the Carter campaign of 1976 are examples of campaigns holding a wide early September lead that saw their enviable position disintegrate during the fall. (If the 1968 campaign had lasted a few days longer, Hubert Humphrey likely would have won, Ford's errors, most notably his insistence during a debate that the Communists did not control Poland, allowed the slipping Jimmy Carter to hang on for a narrow victory.)

The memory that formidable campaigns can severely slip in the polls and still win should be comforting to the Bush campaign, which was overshadowed in the last weeks of August by a resurgent Gore campaign. At the same time, Democrats in California returned in droves to the party following their flirtation with Green Party nominee Ralph Nader. At the same time, Friends of the Earth -- which many had thought would endorse Nader -- held its nose and publicly backed Gore. As of Labor Day, Nader had only the endorsement of the California Nurses Association, the government workers' local in Los Angeles and the historically left-leaning United Electrical Workers.

At the same time, Republicans who had been counting on Nader to split the Democratic vote still should feel hopeful, especially in smaller states where the insurgent candidate could cost the Democrat valuable electoral votes. During the last week of August, 10,500 people in Portland, Ore., paid $7 apiece to hear Nader speak. Oregon and Washington state, lately Democratic strongholds in presidential contests, remained up for grabs in the polls.

This year, the candidates were in a statistical dead heat for the popular vote during the Labor Day weekend. The other two modern presidential campaigns in which this happened were in 1960 and 1980. Twenty years ago, the race remained narrow until the debate between incumbent Carter and challenger Ronald Reagan. Following that, everything fell Reagan's way during the last nine days of the campaign. In 1960, Richard Nixon and John Kennedy exchanged leads in the polls several times before Kennedy won by two-tenths of 1 percent of the popular vote, the closest presidential election since the 19th century.

Professional observers seem to think that 1960 is the appropriate comparison for 2000. Indeed, barring some extreme snafu by one of the candidates during the debates, it seems likely that the popular vote will be extremely close. (But remember that 1960 saw the highest turnout of eligible voters -- 70 percent -- in modern times. Many predict this year will see the smallest.)

That helps explain the peculiar dance that went on in early September concerning the format and locations of proposed presidential debates. The Bush campaign hoped to put the two nominees together on NBC's Meet the Press and CNN's Larry King Show, while Gore was insisting on first utilizing the debate commission's proposed meetings on college campuses in Boston, Winston-Salem and St. Louis. Rival networks quickly put the kibosh on Bush's proposal, but Republicans continued to look for an arrangement where the Texas governor could function in a more informal setting, where he is at his best.

While the two sides dithered about debates, however, the question remained as to how best to appeal to the estimated 10 percent of likely voters who remain undecided. Many of these are white, blue-collar workers who voted for Reagan but returned to Clinton four years ago. Polls and focus groups say the undecideds are hypersensitive to "negativity" on the part of candidates. Therefore, appealing to them is a delicate business not congenial to the sort of robust campaigning often favored by political consultants and media advisers.

Well, if it was policy they wanted, then it was policy they would get. Of course, there were some missteps along the way. On Sept. 5, the day Bush announced his long-awaited prescription-drug plan, media eyes were focusing gleefully on a Labor Day crack by the GOP candidate. Mounting a stage in Naperville, Ill., Bush observed New York Times reporter Adam Clymer, whom he regards as unfriendly, and made a decidedly unfriendly reference about the reporter to running-mate Dick Cheney. In the immortal words of the Washington Times account, Bush described the unfortunate Clymer as "`a major league (deleted),' employing a vulgar euphemism for a rectal aperture."