Battle for Midwest Is Turning Into Rout for Bush's Campaign : Politics: As President fails to win suburban voters in Ohio, Michigan and Illinois, the focus shifts to Perot's gains on Clinton lead.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN

Oct. 23, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

MENTOR, Ohio — Times aren’t that tough in this comfortable suburban community about 30 minutes northeast of Cleveland.

Even in the teeth of the recession, this city of almost 50,000 has added more than 1,500 manufacturing jobs since 1988. Housing starts have slowed a bit since last year, but on a gray autumn day, you can still see bulldozers carving out more home sites from stands of trees now crowned with leaves of burnished red and gold.

“Property values continue to go up,” says Jim Struna, Mentor’s mayor. “And people keep buying the new houses as fast as they build them.”

And yet even here, in this swing suburban community where George Bush carried fully 62% of the vote four years ago, the President appears to be sinking beneath a widespread disillusionment over his handling of domestic concerns.

One private poll for a local candidate this week showed Bush’s support has eroded to where he manages only an even split with Democrat Bill Clinton. To offset the Democratic strength in such cities as Cleveland and Youngstown, Bush has to do much better in suburbs like Mentor if he is to carry Ohio and its 21 electoral votes.

“In my opinion, he’s beaten himself,” says Lynne L. Mazeika, a Republican member of the Mentor City Council, who is uncertain whether she will vote for Bush again. “He’s not focused on the right issues; he’s not concentrated on what the people in the country want to hear. And it’s not that difficult to figure out what we want to hear.”

So it goes across the industrial Midwest for President Bush in his battle with Arkansas Gov. Clinton and independent candidate Ross Perot.

From the start, both of the major party candidates have targeted Illinois, Michigan and Ohio--with 61 electoral votes among them--as key battlegrounds. But now, the battle shows signs of becoming a rout, with polls showing Clinton clearly ahead in Michigan and Ohio and holding a probably insurmountable lead of almost 20 percentage points in Illinois.

“The economy is driving politics in all three states,” said Chicago-based Democratic media consultant David Axelrod. “That’s Bush’s fundamental problem. People have given up on him on this issue, and it’s the only issue that they care about.”

Perot, though still in third place, has shown more potential than Bush of late to scramble the equation here. With his strong performances in the three presidential debates, Perot’s support has moved upward across the region. In Ohio, private polls show him doubling from about 8% to 15% in the last several days.

If that trend continues, it could create some anxious moments for Clinton. With Bush reduced to virtually the core GOP vote in all three states, many analysts believe that continued growth in Perot’s support is likely to hurt Clinton more than the President.

In Ohio, for instance, Perot’s rise has caused Clinton’s margin over Bush to narrow from double digits to the high single digits, according to private polling. One tracking poll in a congressional district outside Cleveland that includes Mentor shows Clinton’s margin over Bush dropping in half this week as Perot’s support has climbed toward 20%. Pollsters report similar trends in parts of Michigan.

At this point, Clinton and Perot are competing for “people who are turned off by what they’ve seen in the last 12 years and are looking for an alternative,” says Jeff Rusnak, a Democratic consultant in Cleveland.

Some local observers believe Perot could further press Clinton in these states if he continues to push the populist agenda--highlighted by his opposition to the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement--that he sharpened in the final debate Monday.

“On those issues, Perot is going to pull Clinton people,” says Colleen Pero, the Bush coordinator in Michigan.

Even so, Perot is a wild card in Bush’s calculations too. In all three states, Bush is running radio ads alleging that Clinton’s economic and environmental plans would cost jobs. New television ads show ordinary voters questioning Clinton’s trustworthiness and complaining he would raise their taxes.

Those attacks, underscored in the Monday debate in Michigan, appear to be increasing the percentage of voters with a negative impression of Clinton. But what has happened in the last several days, some analysts say, is that voters uncertain about Clinton have shifted not to Bush but to Perot.

“As Bush knocks those people off Clinton, they’re not coming back to him, they’re going to Perot, and that doesn’t do much good for Bush,” says Ed Sarpolus, a Democratic pollster based in Michigan.

The hard fact for Republicans is that Bush has remained stuck below 40% in polls in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois for weeks--and shows few signs of broadening his appealnow. “Even if Bush does bounce back up, the real question is where does he get the last five or six points” to win the states, says John C. Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron.

In each of these three states, the story told by local analysts and political professionals is remarkably similar. Anxiety about the nation’s economic course has peeled away from Bush two critical elements of the successful GOP coalition during the 1980s: blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” and more affluent suburban independents and Republicans.

From the Detroit suburbs of Warren and Roseville, to Euclid and Parma outside Cleveland and the ethnic wards of Chicago, Bush is facing widespread desertion from the Reagan Democrats that bolstered the GOP during the 1980s.

In Michigan, for example, a mid-October survey by Sarpolus of areas with high concentrations of Reagan Democrats showed Bush attracting just 15% of the vote, with Perot drawing 13% and Clinton 60%. Since then, Sarpolus says, Clinton’s support has probably slipped a bit, though Perot, not Bush, has been the beneficiary.

The primary force behind this reversal is economic: Each of these states has lost over 100,000 jobs since the recession began, and many blue-collar workers remain nervous about continued retrenchment by such major employers as General Motors.

But Clinton’s success in such tradition-minded communities as Macomb County, Mich., the prototypal breeding ground for Reagan Democrats, has also depended upon his ability to neutralize the racially tinged cultural issues that ground up Democratic nominees before him, such as Michael S. Dukakis in 1988.

Since early September, Clinton has filled Midwest television screens with ads touting his support for the death penalty and work requirements for welfare recipients. “It’s very important that he seems to be a centrist,” says Leo Lalonde, the Democratic chairman in Macomb County. “If we were running another Dukakis, even with the economy as bad as it is, they’d probably stick with the incumbent.”

Compounding Bush’s problems is the spread of worries about the economy into white-collar suburbs. Local analysts say that although the recession of the early 1980s flattened the Midwest more completely, this downturn has engendered greater anxiety in the suburbs because it has produced more middle-management layoffs in Fortune 500 corporations.

That economic uneasiness--reinforced by unhappiness at the conservative social message projected from the GOP convention in August--raises the prospect of substantially reduced margins for Bush in traditionally Republican suburbs across the region. For instance, four years ago, Bush carried two-thirds of the votes in the so-called “collar counties” outside Chicago. But a Chicago Tribune poll earlier this month showed Clinton running dead-even with Bush in the area now.

Even in thriving Mentor, there’s an undertow of uncertainty dragging Bush down.

“A lot of my friends in business are somewhat anxious,” says Mayor Struna, a community college professor. “They’re all aware of the downsizing of the major corporations. And a lot of us are concerned about what our kids are going to be able to do.”