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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 34

HILLARY CLINTON

The Race in Key Places


An exclusive TIME poll shows Clinton well ahead of Bush in the
battleground suburban counties where the election will be won
or lost

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Laurence I.
Barrett/Little Rock, Tom Curry/New York and Dan
Goodgame/Washington


    George Bush ia a creature of the suburbs. He was born in
a residential enclave south of Boston, reared in a leafy bedroom
community north of New York City and made his first leap into
politics in the 1960s from the fast-growing neighborhoods
northwest of Houston. In 1988 he ran hard for the suburban vote
and won most of it. As his longtime pollster Robert Teeter once
put it, "Without the suburbs, we wouldn't have won."

    But many of the same regions that pushed Bush over the top
four years ago are far cooler to his candidacy today. A TIME
poll of five swing suburban counties in five battleground
states -- counties where Bush must win or at least remain
competitive -- spells trouble for the President: in all but one,
Bush is trailing Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton by
larger-than-expected margins. While Clinton holds a 6-point lead
among likely voters nationwide, he is ahead by roughly twice
that margin in most of these battleground counties. "If this
keeps up," says a senior adviser to the Republican campaign, "it
may be too late."

    That's probably an overstatement, but it is striking that
Bush is trailing where he and his party have traditionally been
strongest. In five of the past six elections, Republicans won
the White House in large part because they enjoyed lopsided
support from voters who fled the troubled cities in search of
a safer and more comfortable life. As the suburbs have
mushroomed in California, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan,
Illinois, Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania, so has the Republican
grip on those states' electoral votes. In 1980 and 1984,
Republicans under Ronald Reagan rolled up big enough margins
among the country-club set, right-wing Republicans and
conservative Democrats to overcome easily traditional Democratic
strength inside large cities.

    George Bush tried to repeat the Republican formula in 1988
but found it harder than he expected. Unable to capture more
than half the pivotal Reagan Democrats, who had suffered from
industrial layoffs and distrusted his patrician background, Bush
compensated by reaching deep into a new group of voters known
as "suburban independents." Making up about 20% of the
electorate, this group was younger and more moderate than the
Reagan Democrats on social issues such as abortion, race and the
environment. But these independents were more conservative on
economic issues, such as taxes and federal spending. They worked
in white-collar jobs and, because they had prospered under
Reagan, appreciated Bush's risk-averse, steady-as-she-goes
approach. Wooing them relentlessly with both his "no new taxes"
and "kinder, gentler" themes, Bush won 3 of every 5 of these
voters in 1988.

    But those margins -- at least at the moment -- aren't
materializing again for the Republicans. The suburban
independents who once believed they were immune to the ups and
downs of the economy are now deeply worried about their future.
Many have been hit by layoffs, seen the value of their homes
fall or realized that the new towns to which they fled provide
no escape from crime, drugs or traffic-clotted commutes. Four
out of 5 such voters surveyed by TIME believe their region is
still in a recession. Having abandoned the Democratic Party for
economic reasons in the 1980s, they are now poised to return.
"The people in the suburbs have just been hammered by the
recession," explains Mark Baldassare, a professor of sociology
at the University of California at Irvine. "They're blaming Bush
for not keeping the economy going smoothly and providing jobs."

    Consider St. Louis County, Missouri, a populous cluster of
Republican-leaning suburbs outside the city of St. Louis that
Bush won by 10 points in 1988. Voters' doubts about the future
of the large local auto-parts and defense industries have helped
put Clinton ahead of Bush by 11 points today. That the gap
exists in an area that Republicans normally rely on to produce
large margins to make up for Democratic strength elsewhere in
the Show Me state underscores Bush's dilemma. Notes Joyce
Aboussie, a longtime Democratic organizer for Congressman Dick
Gephardt: "If the Republicans don't carry St. Louis County by
10 points, they have a big problem."

    The prognosis for Bush is even worse in Middlesex County,
New Jersey, where G.O.P. state director Bill Palatucci warns,
"You've got to play the Democrats to a draw, or you're dead"
statewide. Located 20 miles southwest of New York City and
extending almost to Princeton, Middlesex is home to large
numbers of both older Reagan Democrats and younger suburban
independents. At the moment, 69% of the county's voters say the
economy is the "main problem" the candidates should be
addressing in the campaign. Though Middlesex is the most
affluent of the five counties surveyed -- the median household
income is $48,760 -- it also suffers from an 8.1% unemployment
rate, the highest in any of the five counties. In 1988 Middlesex
gave Bush a 10-point margin of victory; today Bush is trailing
Clinton by 13 points. But the Democrats aren't taking it for
granted: Clinton's state headquarters is in New Brunswick, in
the heart of Middlesex, and Clinton's top operative, Rich
Gannon, purposefully launched his first door-to-door canvassing
there. Last week Hillary Clinton appeared at two events in
Middlesex. "If we can break even with these voters," said Stan
Greenberg, Clinton's pollster, "we'll be able to declare victory
in November."

    Worries about the economy are on the verge of putting some
California suburbs -- and probably the state -- out of Bush's
reach. In 1988 Dukakis won high-growth Contra Costa County,
across the bay from San Francisco, with a 3-point margin. Mary
Wilson, who manages the Bush campaign in the state, says the
county is a "good snapshot of California" because it includes
"pockets of Republicans, minorities, suburban yuppies, growth
industries, agriculture and blue-collar jobs." Wilson notes that
Republican candidates typically run 6 to 7 points ahead of
Republican registration, which is around 45%. But while both
Bush and Clinton visited Contra Costa in July, the Arkansas
Governor is currently ahead there by a stunning 28 points.

    Even in De Kalb County, Georgia, where unemployment hovers
below the national average at 6.3%, Bush faces a formidable
challenge. Nestled east of Atlanta, De Kalb provided the
backdrop to the movie Driving Miss Daisy, and is home to a
diverse mix of rich and poor, white and black, Republican and
Democrat, as well as longtime residents and new immigrants from
the North. Dukakis narrowly won De Kalb with 50.2% of the vote
in 1988; at the moment, Bush trails Clinton by a daunting 23%.

    The results from De Kalb reveal how frayed Bush's
coalition has become. In this suburb more than 90% of registered
Democrats say they expect to stick with the party's
standard-bearer in November. Additionally, about 11% of local
registered Republicans and 46% of De Kalb's independents say
they are leaning toward Clinton. Among voters ages 18 to 34,
traditionally one of Bush's strongest constituencies, Clinton
is leading 62% to Bush's 28%. Among women, Clinton captures 63%
of likely voters.

    But if many of these voters seem to have given up on Bush,
they aren't all sold on Clinton. In closely fought Montgomery
County, Ohio, an area that incorporates Dayton, Bush is in a
statistical dead heat with Clinton and would win in a three-way
contest with Texas industrialist H. Ross Perot, who remains on
the ballot in Ohio. When voters who were leaning toward Bush are
added to the mix, the President wins the county by 7 points.
Such support for the incumbent ensures that Ohio will be one of
the closest contests this fall. The Buckeye State, admits
Clinton's field marshal Mark Longabaugh, is "going to be bare
knuckles to the end."

    Bush is beginning to fight back, painting Clinton as a
dangerous taxer and spender who will raise the deficit, a
problem suburbanites regard as acute. In a speech in Union City,
New Jersey, five days after the Houston convention, Bush said,
"The big point I want to make in this working state is high
spending and higher taxes will not do any favors to the American
worker." Though Bush helped to almost double the deficit in four
years, his antitax message, says G.O.P. state director
Palatucci, "is one that we're going to make over and over again.
The contrast on taxes is what's giving us our legs right now."

    Bush visited a siren-exporting factory in the suburbs of
St. Louis two weeks ago and warned voters there that Clinton
would place a tax on foreign investment. "This taxing," Bush
said, "will literally destroy jobs, discourage investment and
threaten to start an economic war just as markets the world over
are opening up to American products." Anxious to cleave away
some of Clinton's support among Missouri's independents, Bush
met for 20 minutes with four of Perot's top backers in the
state after he gave the speech. All four endorsed the President
the next day in a three-city fly-around arranged by the Bush
campaign.

    Last week, at a considerable premium in cost, Clinton's
aides rushed a new 60-second commercial onto the airwaves in
nine states (Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Louisiana, North
Carolina, Connecticut, Kentucky, New Mexico and Colorado) in an
attempt to win over fence-sitters before Bush's antitax argument
gelled. "Something's happening," says a disembodied voice as
images of elderly white and black women trip across the screen.
"People are ready. Because they've had enough. Enough of seeing
their incomes fall behind and their jobs on the line."

    Bush still has some reserves of support to draw on: more
than half of suburban independents say they have a favorable
impression of him personally, and equal numbers report they
would "be proud to have him as President." But they disapprove
of his handling of his job in numbers 5 to 10 points higher than
does the population as a whole. Nor does Bush's Trumanesque
attack on the Democratic Congress appear to have much purchase
with swing voters. While most suburbanites blame Democrats in
Congress more than Bush for the economic problems in their local
area, they also plan to vote for the Democratic congressional
candidate in their district.

    The TIME poll illuminates why the family-values theme Bush
and his campaign chieftains advanced at the Republican
Convention backfired with many suburban voters. Bush's aides
pumped up the family-values souffle in part to keep the party's
rebellious right wing on board. But that lurch to the right
seems to have alienated the center: while 60% of the voters in
the five counties worry most about the economy, only 5% see
"family values" as the main problem facing the nation -- an
imbalance that helps explain why Bush's aides announced two
weeks ago that they would turn down the volume on family values.
"By and large," noted U.C. Irvine's Baldassare, "suburban voters
are pragmatic Republicans who are more interested in what George
Bush is saying about the economy and the deficit than in family
values or abortion."

    The result is that Bush is having more difficulty in 1992
holding his base while reaching out to the middle. His pollsters
were dismayed to discover after the Houston convention that
only his acceptance-speech attack on trial lawyers had any
resonance with swing voters. Otherwise, the umbrella issues of
crime and patriotic pride, which he hoped would appeal to both
the right and the swing vote, are falling on dead ears.

    Bush's central message at the moment seems to lie in his
grim warning that as bad as things are now, Clinton could make
them worse. That Bush must resort to such fearmongering
suggests how much harder a time he is having holding his
coalition together today than he did four years ago. Bush might
as well have been describing his own campaign when he accused
Clinton two weeks ago of trying to "exploit the darker impulses
of this uncertain age -- fear of the future, fear of the unknown
. . ."

    Clinton aides see in Bush's recent travel schedule hints
that the G.O.P. may have begun to focus its attention on the
South and Midwest at the expense of the West Coast. Bush aides
retort that the President canceled a planned Western swing only
because of Hurricane Andrew and spent Labor Day weekend on a
pancakes-and-polka tour through the Midwest. Even if Bush is
ready to write off the Golden State, notes John Emerson,
Clinton's California director, he doesn't have to decide now.
"Because most of California is media," said Emerson, "you don't
have to make decisions until a few weeks out."

    Nonetheless, electoral-map strategists from both parties
already see the distinct possibility that the Republicans may
soon be forced to choose their targets from a much smaller base
of states than they are accustomed to in order to compile the
270 electoral votes needed to win. For years Republican strength
in the South and the West meant that the Democrats had to scrape
together 270 electoral votes from a much narrower band of states
in the North and the East. Former Republican chairman Lee
Atwater liked to say that the Democrats' odds of threading that
needle were about as good as "pulling to an inside straight" in
poker.

    Now the tables may be turning. If Bush's showing in the
suburb-rich battleground states is any indication, it may be the
Republicans who have to draw to an inside straight in order to
win this year.