The 34% Solution

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

IT IS AN AXIOM OF POLITICS THAT running for the White House involves a zig and then a zag: during the primaries, candidates of both parties normally concentrate on wooing the liberal or conservative wings of their parties; once nominated, they pivot toward the broad middle of the American electorate, where the White House is lost and won.

Dan Quayle's attempt to energize conservatives by attacking Murphy Brown shows just how different the 1992 campaign has already become. Ross Perot's pending entrance in the race -- and the possibility that he might attract between a quarter and a third or more of the vote this fall -- has George Bush and Bill Clinton paying unusually heavy tribute to their parties' core constituents. Instead of moving their candidates toward the center to win, both camps are seriously mulling over how to win the White House with just the thinnest plurality of voters. Call it the 34% solution.

The central calculation that Democrats and Republicans are now testing is whether it is possible to capture the presidency this fall with just their most ardent supporters plus a sliver of help from the independents, who seem increasingly devoted to Perot. Ultimately Bush and Clinton may have little choice: with Perot drawing most deeply from independents and matching Bush in national polls, it seems increasingly possible that the next President may win as little as 34% to 45% of the popular vote.

If a three-man race means a three-way split, that requires both Bush and Clinton to shore up their base support at all costs. "The question we're asking ourselves is whether there are enough conservatives and Republicans to make up 35% of the electorate," explained one Bush official. "Is our base big enough to win an election in a three-man race?"

Slow to realize Perot's potential, Bush's lieutenants are still split over the answer. White House chief of staff Sam Skinner, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady and campaign chief Bob Mosbacher continue to doubt that the Perot challenge will survive past Labor Day. But Quayle, campaign chairman Bob Teeter and manager Fred Malek, stunned that Bush is dropping in the polls even while the economy is improving, are starting to hedge their bets.

The Vice President's attack on a fictional TV character is only the most blatant attempt by the White House to highlight issues dear to conservatives. Fearful of mouthing Quayle's controversial line, Bush will instead continue to sound law-and-order themes in the wake of the Los Angeles riots and will appease conservatives by vetoing a measure this week that lifts a four-year ban on federal fetal-tissue research. While such stands may not please a majority of American voters, Bush is not playing to the majority anymore. "The Murphy Brown thing is a big winner for us with our base," said one Bush official, "and holding on to our base is what we're concentrating on now."

The minimalist strategy will make it easier for Bush to manage his coalition of right-wingers and yuppie moderates. In 1988, after running to the right in the primaries, Bush reached out to independents in the fall with the "kinder and gentler" clean-air and child-care initiatives, and he won easily. But in a three-man race, such overtures may be unnecessary, even unwise. Conservative Republicans have never really liked or trusted Bush, and they could bolt to Perot if the President starts sounding moderate again.

For example, when the G.O.P. holds hearings this week in Salt Lake City on the party's 1992 platform, the Bush forces believe they can more easily ignore % the demands of three Republican organizations that will call on the party to back the right to an abortion. Ann Stone, who leads Republicans for Choice, thinks Bush must again become pro-choice -- a position Bush himself once held -- to prevent disgruntled moderate voters from casting their lot with the pro- choice Perot. Stone also fears an anti-Republican backlash should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1974 decision that guaranteed abortion rights.

But the men at Bush headquarters are, if anything, heading in the other direction. "You really have to go after the pro-choice vote in a two-man race," said a senior adviser to the Bush campaign, "but you need less of it in a three-man race."

Perot's emergence has been most difficult for Clinton, who has been shunted to third place in most national polls. Clinton had recruited a number of political consultants who are experts at turning old-fashioned liberals, particularly from the South, into hard-headed moderates. Now, instead of moving to the center, Clinton may soon be quick-marching to the left. Should Perot's support hold, Clinton too will be squeezed into a 34% strategy and may have to run instead as a relatively unrefined liberal in order to hold his base and win.

If so, Clinton's first challenge is to cling fast to black voters, who are among the Democratic Party's most loyal followers but who have turned out in far lower numbers this year than in 1988, when Jesse Jackson was on the primary ballot. Clinton will almost certainly reinforce his appeal to blacks more than he might otherwise have intended.

To woo women, Clinton will perhaps take more of a leading role in the fight for abortion rights, which he backs but for which he has in the past let others fight. "Tactically," said Harrison Hickman, a Democratic pollster, "you want to focus on getting those people out to vote. Strategically, you have to take a leaf from Perot's book by establishing your leadership credentials."

That's what Clinton was doing Tuesday in Los Angeles when he appeared before an audience of gay campaign contributors and activists. After dressing down members of the militant gay group ACT UP in New York last month for misstating his record, Clinton last week pledged that someone infected with the AIDS virus will speak to the nation during the Democratic Convention in July. Bush campaign officials chortled privately at this gimmicky pander, happy to see Clinton on the verge of alienating Southern evangelical Christians. %

A three-way race may force Clinton to abandon some of the free-market economic ideas that he has been lab-testing for several years as a way to appeal to disaffected Democrats and independents. John Breaux, a Louisiana Senator and a Clinton operative, last week told the Democratic platform committee, "We have to show that the new Democratic Party has learned from the mistakes of the past." But if moderates are no longer important to Democrats in 1992, Clinton may want to put those lessons off indefinitely.

Meanwhile, like Middle Age cartographers who have just learned that the world isn't flat, officials in both parties are frantically redrawing the old maps by which they have charted strategy for presidential campaigns during the past 30 years. Traditionally, Republicans begin a two-man race with a solid 25 states in the South and West, while Democratic nominees have counted on easy wins in a dozen relatively populous Northeastern states. As the campaign nears the stretch in October, both candidates fight it out in half a dozen or so Midwestern states and California.

But the Perot candidacy, says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, "takes the Electoral College map and throws everything up in the air." Perot's front-runner status in most Western states, as well as California, Texas and Ohio, has Bush shifting his sights from the West and South to the North and East. Republicans generally draw a solid 30% to 40% of the vote in those regions, but rarely a majority. States that seemed unwinnable a few weeks ago -- Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, even Massachusetts -- are now within reach.

Two top Bush campaign advisers, after practically giving California up for lost six weeks ago made a special trip to the Golden State in mid-May to reassess the President's new and improved chances there in a three-way race. "The incredible thing," said a Bush campaign official during a closed- door strategy session last week, "is that we're ahead in New York and behind in Idaho" -- a reversal of the normal alignment.

Clinton, who previously had to hold the Democratic Northeast and fight for the border states, the Midwest and the West Coast in order to win, now has a better chance of winning the South outright. In such states as Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana, where blacks account for between one-fourth and one-third of the vote, winning becomes suddenly feasible for Clinton if he can carry all of the black vote and a fourth of the white vote.

With Perot siphoning votes from Bush among conservatives, Clinton can now contend honorably in Texas and Florida. Notes Tad Devine, a veteran Democratic number cruncher: "Perot's presence pulls Bush off the electoral Mount Olympus he would otherwise be perched upon and deposits him onto a much more competitive level playing field."

On the other hand, early Clinton advantages over Bush in such populous states as New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania have evaporated as Perot has mounted his independent challenge. Still up for grabs are the pivotal states of Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Missouri and California. The problem for both Bush and Clinton is that in most of these places, Perot is pulling ahead. And in some states, such as Oregon, nearly a majority of both Clinton and Bush backers say they would be likely to vote for Perot if the election were held today.

Of course, the election isn't until November, by which time the billionaire businessman may have failed miserably at presidential politics. In the meantime, most of the base tending taking place now is good politics for either a two-man or a three-man race. As a Bush official put it last week, "The question is, Are we fleet enough, are we agile enough to drop back into a two-man strategy if Perot proves to be a flash in the pan?" In that event, the White House will go to the party that does the best job of lurching back toward the center.

Such calculations, however, go a long way toward explaining why that is unlikely to happen. If Bush and Clinton stood stoutly for something in this curious campaign rather than seeming to shift with the winds, they would not have generated the public discontent Perot is now exploiting.