In some elections, protest voters best predictors

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The day after Maine’s 1978 June primary election I couldn’t make the numbers add up.

All over Maine, it seemed, the vote totals for Sen. William D. Hathaway were much smaller than they should have been. Both Hathaway and his Republican challenger, Bill Cohen, were unopposed on the ballot.

A few hundred Republicans who voted for other GOP candidates in other races did not check Cohen’s name.

On the Democratic side, about 17 percent of those who cast votes for other party candidates did not put a check mark after Hathaway’s name.

“Bill Hathaway is in serious trouble with his own party,” I wrote on June 17, 1978. Cohen buried Hathaway in the fall election.

Four years later, I noticed the same phenomenon in the contest between appointed-Sen. George J. Mitchell and his GOP challenger, Rep. David F. Emery. In the 1982 June primary, with both candidates unopposed, something on the order of 8 percent to 10 percent of Maine Republicans who voted skipped Emery’s name. Mitchell prevailed in a landslide.

By now, you’ve figured out where this column is going.

Republicans had not yet coalesced behind Sen. Bob Dole when Maine voters slogged their way through a snowstorm Tuesday to vote in the state’s first presidential primary. With five GOP candidates on the ballot, Dole won with 46 percent, or 30,905 of the votes cast.

About 2 percent of the Republicans voting — around 1,500 voters — checked the “uncommitted” box.

There should have been no uncertainty on the Democratic side. Bill Clinton has been president for three years. His only opponent was Lyndon LaRouche, a recently released felon.

Clinton received 23,825 votes, or 89 percent of the Democratic vote. LaRouche got 718 votes, or 3 percent. About 8 percent of Maine Democratic voters — 2,231 — checked the “uncommitted” box.

The numbers for LaRouche and uncommitted jumped out at me.

With no other races on the ballot, why would 2,949 Maine Democratic voters brave a snowstorm just to cast a protest vote against Bill Clinton?

For that matter, why would Bob Dole’s divided vote total against a snarly field of GOP challengers exceed that of the virtually unopposed incumbent Democratic president?

The national Democratic Party lists Maine as one of Clinton’s strongest states. It recently released a poll showing that Clinton would bury Dole among Maine voters — 62 percent to 25 percent.

Polls are polls.

Maine’s March 5 primary measured real voters.

From where I sit, the 11 percent protest vote against Clinton on Tuesday seems dangerously close to the Hathaway-Emery early warning zone.

Chris Potholm of Bowdoin College, who has done extensive polling in Maine, said Clinton is much weaker than the current polls indicate when compared with historical data on past presidents.

“Everybody has been focusing on Bob Dole for being tired, old and weak. Steve Forbes spent millions on television trashing Dole with that message,” Pot- holm said.

All that will change once Republicans stop attacking each other and concentrate their fire on Clinton, he said.

Victoria Murphy, chairwoman of Maine’s Democratic Party, was not concerned about the 11 percent Democratic protest vote.

“It would have been too frightening if [Clinton] got 100 percent,” she said.

Murphy speculated that many of the non-Clinton voters were individuals who “registered with [Ross Perot’s] Reform Party, but then came to re-register with us to send a message.”

Dole’s sweep of the New York primary on Thursday has virtually locked up the GOP nomination. The focus of the presidential race now shifts back to Washington, D.C., where an intriguing scenario begins to play out.

As Senate majority leader, Dole will control the congressional agenda the same way Mitchell did during Bush’s presidency. Mitchell was ruthlessly partisan.

Democrats sent Bush poison pill after poison pill, knowing the GOP president would be forced to veto the measures. Bush’s own priorities, such as a capital gains tax cut to revive the economy, were shot down like Scud missiles over Saudi Arabia. Led by Mitchell in the Senate, congressional Democrats attempted to stop Bush from launching his greatest political triumph, the Gulf War.

The strategy of portraying Bush as the pitiful “gridlocked” president worked.

White House aide John Sununu blamed Mitchell for single-handedly prolonging the 1990 recession to bring about Bush’s defeat. Bush himself has echoed those sentiments.

Clinton is in a bind. His biggest political initiative, national health care reform, never got out of committee with Democrats in control of Congress.

The president said he is for a balanced budget, but vetoed the first such document sent to the White House in three decades.

As a candidate, Clinton promised to “change welfare as we know it,” but vetoed a welfare reform bill that had bipartisan support in Congress.

While running in 1992, Clinton promised a “middle class tax break.” As president, he vetoed the GOP plan to give families a $500-per-child tax break.

The GOP will attack Clinton as the “do-nothing” president.

Dole’s history has been one of cutting deals to get things done. He took flak from his own party in backing Clinton’s decision to deploy U.S. troops in Bosnia.

In the next few weeks, we’ll see if Dole has opted to pursue the Mitchell stratagem of gridlocking the White House — or has decided to cut some deals with Democrats to prove he could get things if voters elected him president.

— WASHINGTON