WHO VOTED?

	March 13, 2000
	Reading the exit polls, and to Gwen Ifill.

GWEN IFILL: Believe it or not, there are still 26 presidential primaries and caucuses to go before the party nomination process officially ends in June. But voters have already told us quite a bit about what's on their minds this year. Here to discuss who voted and why: Linda Divall, a Republican pollster; Mark Penn, who polls for the Democrats; and Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press. We've covered the ups and downs of all the candidates and who's been rising and surging and who's tailed off and who dropped out. But what exactly are the voters telling us, Linda Divall, especially Republican voters? LINDA DIVALL: Well, I think first and foremost they're saying that they want to defeat Al Gore. And if there's any one thing that will unite the Republican Party, it is that we appear to have a nominee in George Bush and I think if George Bush he reaches out to the McCain voters and talks about restoring integrity and honesty to the White House, continues to say that Al Gore can't possibly live up to any type of standard on campaign finance reform, you have an excellent chance of winning over those primary voters. And the reason that's so important is the exit polling data clearly shows us that these primary voters -- that moral values is most important; they also admired in John McCain something -- he would stand up and say what he believed in. And that's incumbent upon George Bush to do just that, and I think perhaps what Bush needs to do is move away from that compassionate conservatism theme and address the reform issues, education reform, Social Security reform. What's interesting in the Republican primary if you look at all the exit polling data from Super Tuesday, is as many people said the budget surplus priority ought to be Social Security as said it ought to be in the form of tax cuts. That's a quite different Republican number than what we've seen in past years. GWEN IFILL: Mark Penn, what are the Democrats -- Democratic voters telling us? MARK PENN: Well, I think they are sending the message loud and clear that they want to continue the progress that's been made in the last seven years. I think Al Gore both can continue the progress and bring in a new wave of change on issues like health care, education -- and very importantly on fiscal responsibility, an issue that the Republicans used to have an edge on. Al Gore now has a decisive edge with voters on a fiscally moderate policy of continued progress and preserving Social Security instead of tax cuts. I think really the voters of the Democratic Party now are nominating a centrist candidate. And what we've seen come out of the Republicans is that to get any votes in the Republican Party you have to move far right, and Bush sure did, abandoning his original centrist positions, whether Social Security, whether it's a constitutional amendment on choice, or whether it's a huge tax cut. And Al Gore, I think, has moved right into the center. GWEN IFILL: Andrew Kohut, we have turn both Democrat Al Gore talking about - like John McCain - I - and we just heard Lind Divall alluding, as Republicans have been to, about the - to the John McCain reform agenda. Is there such a thing as a john McCain block of voters? ANDREW KOHUT: Well, there's certainly people who voted for John McCain and others who wish they could have. But it seems to me that the McCain voters are not portable, easily portable en masse. They don't have one ideology, they don't come from one common demographic pool. And, most importantly, they weren't all that reform oriented. Only about one in five McCain voters, for example in New York, or less than one in five said that campaign finance was their top issue. And that was the case in every state on Super Tuesday. It never got much above that. And even in the big primaries that McCain won, campaign finance wasn't the top issue of these voters. Political reform was part of the McCain package, but more than anything else, it was McCain himself, not what he stood for in terms of issues or ideology, that's going to be very difficult for these candidates to get up and adopt a mantle of reform, given who they are, or get up and say hey, vote for me, I'm just like John McCain in personal terms, because clearly, given who they are, they're not. GWEN IFILL: So Andrew Kohut, do the McCain voters, assuming that they exist and share a common set of goals, do they stay home in the fall, can they be energized for another candidate? ANDREW KOHUT: Well, I think what they're going to do is they're going to mostly return to their partisan roots, either Republican or Democrat, and they will become swing voters, not through the prism of what John McCain stood for, but through the tensions about Gore and Bush that were revealed in the exit polls. On the one hand you have Gore, who has character problems and is associated with the problems of the administration. On the other hand, the Democrats are stronger on issues. So there's one tension -- on the Republican side, the promise that Bush will do a good job of cleaning up Washington, but on the other hand worries about the Republicans on the issues, worries about Republican extremism and Gingrich Republicanism. So there's some real clear tensions that offset the strengths of both of these candidates, and the swing voters will evolve on the basis of these tensions, not on the basis of reform, especially Bush and Gore calling themselves reformers. It's a little bit like Macy's and Gimball's calling themselves psychedelic at the end of the 60's when it became very fashionable. In reality, it's just not going to work. GWEN IFILL: Okay, Linda Divall that one goes right over to you over the plate. LINDA DIVALL: Well, I mean, a couple of things. First of all, if you look at the new voters apart from the McCain voters, the new voters who participated in the Super Tuesday process, they were indeed centrist voters. John McCain had very high favorable rating, about 75% in comparison to George Bush's rating of only 49%. But these voters were inspired by McCain's candor, his straight forwardness, his integrity. And I think there's more to see in that package in terms of George W. Bush than in Al Gore. And I think what Al Gore has tried to do this weekend in terms of using campaign finance reform as an issue is absolutely laughable. And I think if you're looking at an election where you have two people, both coming from very similar backgrounds, they have to talk about reform in some dimension to see these are some important changes that we need to make. I think George W. Bush has a unique way of saying there is a new Republican governance that we ought to consider that distinguishes himself from the Republican Congress, it is a way of reaching out to the McCain voter and these new voters. And that new governance embraces limited government, embraces compassionate conservatism, the character of McCain and some of the reform dimension in terms of Social Security reform and education reform. So I think there is a unique opportunity to talk about that as a part of this overall message to the new voters and keeping his face intact as well. GWEN IFILL: To put it mildly, what these candidates have, Mark Penn, is the luxury of time -- five months until the conventions, eight months until the general election. What does Al Gore do either to reach out to those voters who no one is entirely certain who they are, maybe people do know who they are, or to solidify his base so that it's broad enough to defeat a real tough challenger? MARK PENN: Well, you know, I think no one really has appealed to the independent voter yet. We've gone through, as you pointed out, half a primary process in which the people who were talked to and the people who really listened most carefully were the people who were partisan on each side. And the largest block of voters in America today are the independents. So the independents- GWEN IFILL: And who are they? MARK PENN: Well, there are three or four kinds of independents. One, I think they're a lot of suburban women who are not associated with any party, who one of their prime concerns is how are they going to protect and grow up their children. And that means that they're concerned about issues like education, guns, and expanded health care. And that's where I think Gore has very strong positions on each one of those. Then there's another group of new economy fiscal conservatives. They believe that fiscal responsibility has helped ignite the new economy and the kind of prosperity that we have today. Those voters I think, again, also look to Gore as having a fiscally responsible program and not a $2 trillion tax cut. And then there's probably a third group of people who say, yeah, I want an authentic candidate. As authentic candidate voters, they tend to most often go for the new flavor of the month until they kind of find out what the reality of the candidates are. So a lot of those voters said Bush looks good initially, when they found out more about him, they quickly deserted him. You know, again, they're going to take a look at both candidates. I think ultimately the issue of authenticity is really going to be about who's performed for the voters. I think Gore is going to have a strong case, but the right way to define authenticity is the difference between 1992 and 2000, it's the difference between a program of conservatism, because fundamentally George Bush talks about conservatism as his core philosophy, or a sensible change in activism. GWEN IFILL: Mr. Kohut, do we have any evidence that these voters we're talking about - basically - independent voters - have any appetite at all for a third party this time? ANDREW KOHUT: I think that the appetite for the Reform Party in particular is lower in than other elections, certainly lower than it was in 1992 when Perot did so well, and even lower than perhaps in 1996. A lot of this would be judged, though, on the basis of who would represent the Reform Party. Certainly Pat Buchanan would not be an appealing candidate. A candidate such as McCain, according to some of these polls that were conducted over the weekend, would attract a lot of potential voters, I don't know how realistic that is, but it would be very candidate-specific and not party-specific. There's always a desire for a better candidate, and we'll see how much satisfaction or dissatisfaction there is with Gore and Bush over time as this campaign develops. GWEN IFILL: Linda Divall, where do these voters go -- especially in an elongated election year where we're expecting to see Republicans and Democrats pretty much going after each other, the same thing that alienated them -- voters in the primary race, where do they go? LINDA DIVALL: Well, I think that's a very interesting question for these candidates, because Al Gore right now is continuing to run very partisan, very competitive, a very zealous campaign. I think George Bush's greatest attribute is his likeability, his openness, his inclusive nature. And I think that these voters may be disinclined to vote for somebody that they feel is too competitive, who is slamming the opposition from day one. We'll have to see about that. But right now I think these voters are on the sideline, they're saying -- you know -- the balloon has been pricked here, and there really is not this natural candidate that I'm going to gravitate to at this point in time. I think they're going to carefully analyze both candidates, look at who they select for their running mates, look at the national conventions -- obviously very much study the issue agenda.-because issues I think were much more important in selection than they had been in the past. Both Gore and Bush have issued some very serious issues and policy statements during the course of the past six months in a much more significant way than has been advanced before. MARGARET WARNER: Do you agree, Mark Penn? MARK PENN: Well, I certainly think that when we started out six months ago, people thought the personality factor was going to be in Bush's favor. And the truth is Bush now is considerably weakened personality wise. At the same time, and also there are even basic questions about his competence to serve in the office -- whereas Gore has been tremendously strengthened by the primary process, seen as a substantial leader, so personality has been neutralized. Issues now - as they do in every campaign - will come increasingly to the fore, and that's where I think whether it's Social Security, whether it's fiscal responsibility and the balanced budget, whether it's how you spend the surplus, whether it's health care, or education, right now Gore has got commanding leads on those issues. And that's probably what's going to be central to changing the minds of independent voters. GWEN IFILL: Well, it's refreshing to hear what the voters have to say in any case. Mark Penn, Linda Divall, Andrew Kohut, thank you all very much.