It has not really been going on forever, it only seems that way, and by tonight it will be all over. Really.
The presidential campaign of 1988, which began sometime in 1985, ends Tuesday with underdog Michael Dukakis still campaigning, with the polls sending conflicting signals, and with most surveys and experts predicting a win by George Bush but with the final decision still to be made by some 95 million citizens.
That means that almost as many people-87 million or more-won`t take part in making the decision. The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate projected last week that a smaller percentage of eligible voters would turn out Tuesday than four years ago.
”The question is not whether turnout will go down but rather how far,”
said Curtis Gans, director of the committee. ”It could fall below the 1948 level and be the lowest turnout since 1924.”
It was largely because of different methods of predicting the turnout or identifying likely voters that the polls reached different conclusions, though all of them had the Republican ticket of Vice President Bush and Sen. Dan Quayle in the lead.
But most of the surveys agreed that it was Dukakis who was getting the support of most of the voters making up their minds in the past few days. And with some 20 percent of the people saying they still might change their minds, Dukakis kept hoping and campaigning.
”I don`t need sleep, I`m charging,” he said in Ohio before heading to St. Louis, then to the West Coast for appearances in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Then he planned to head east, stopping for a post-midnight rally in Des Moines and a morning appearance in Detroit before heading home to Boston. Throughout the campaign, the candidates spent much of their time attacking each other, often over minor matters, and spent relatively little time and effort discussing the major issues one of them will face as president. This could help explain why neither candidate has aroused much enthusiasm, or why on election eve a fifth of the voters were still saying they might change their minds.
In addition to their hectic personal campaigning Monday, both candidates purchased 30 minutes of election-eve television time to make a final appeal to the voters, and both campaigns were airing their standard, shorter TV commercials in the states where the contest was close.
One of the last pre-election polls offered some signs of hope for the Democrats. Though Bush still led in the last CBS News poll by 49 to 43 percent, his margin was lower than it had been, and most of it was in the South. Dukakis was ahead or almost even in the rest of the country, giving him a chance, if an outside chance, to win the electoral votes of most of the large states outside the South.
Bush`s last-day pace was calm only in comparison to his rival`s. He went from Michigan to Ohio to Missouri and then to a final event in Houston, where he maintains a nominal voting residence in a hotel suite.
”That adrenalin is flowing. Our family`s together. The country`s coming in behind our candidacy,” said the vice president.
His confidence appeared to be well-founded. But the perceptible if small late swing to Dukakis clearly made Republicans nervous, if not worried, and the Bush campaign juggled its schedule, hopping to the states where the race seemed tightest.
That means that the contest must be close in Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, Michigan and California. These states have a total of 125 of the 270 electoral votes needed for victory, and it was in the electoral vote count where Bush`s lead seemed strongest. To win the election, Dukakis would have to carry just about every state where he has even the most remote chance of victory.
If the travels of Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen are any indication, the Democratic ticket also remains competitive in Arkansas, Louisiana and Bentsen`s home state of Texas.
Quayle`s itinerary was probably not as significant because the Indiana senator has been a drag on the Republican ticket, and Bush`s strategists simply hoped to keep their running mate out of the spotlight as much as possible. Though polls indicate that most voters are unhappy about Quayle`s selection, that unhappiness does not appear to be strong enough to cost Bush the lead.
Even the pollsters who give Bush a big lead, though, do not predict a general Republican sweep. According to most analysts and to campaign workers in both parties, the Democrats are likely to maintain roughly the same majorities they now hold in the Senate (54 to 46) and the House of
Representatives (255 to 177, with three vacancies) and to add to the 27 governorships they now hold.
All these contests have been going on for months, but the presidential race unofficially began in June of 1985 when some 700 Republicans gathered in Grand Rapids, Mich., for a Midwestern regional meeting that attracted almost all the party`s likely presidential candidates, including Bush.
They went to Michigan because that state had scheduled an unprecedentedly early delegate selection process that ended in tumult early this year, with supporters of Bush and religious broadcaster Pat Robertson threatening legal action against one another.
Back at the time of that first Republican meeting, Dukakis had hardly been mentioned as a Democratic contender. The early frontrunner for the nomination was former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado. Dukakis entered the race almost two years later, in May of 1987, the same week many leading Democrats were at a party gathering in New Mexico, the same week Gary Hart entertained Donna Rice in his Washington town house while his wife was home in Denver.
A week later, Hart was out of the race. By the end of September, so was Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, after it turned out that he had borrowed freely from the speech of a British politician.
Despite the dropouts, when the year began there were six contenders in each party, and three in each party emerged from the first major contest-the Iowa precinct caucuses. The three Republicans were Bush, Robertson and Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, who won the Iowa contest.
The Democrats were Dukakis, who finished third, and the two men who beat him, Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri and Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois.
A few weeks later, though, Simon was virtually out of the race (though he would make a momentary comeback by winning his home-state primary), Gephardt was hanging on, and two other Democrats appeared to be contenders-Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee and Jesse Jackson.
But neither man could win votes outside his own constituency-white Southerners for Gore and blacks everywhere for Jackson. Though Jackson stayed in the race to the end and nominally finished second to Dukakis, he never really threatened the Massachusetts governor for the nomination.
The Republican contest was settled earlier. Both Dole and Robertson fizzled in the New Hampshire primary, eight days after the Iowa vote, and though both men hung on for a few weeks, Bush won every subsequent primary or caucus that mattered, and no one else`s name was even placed in nomination at the Republican convention in New Orleans.
