On the final weekend, there was rhetoric and there were statistics, and such is the perversity of politics that the rhetoric made more sense.
For all the talk about poll margins going up or down, the presidential campaign ends as it began: Bill Clinton is leading, but he has not yet won.
Because of his lead, which may have increased slightly over the weekend, logic would indicate that he is likely to win. But for weeks he has been stuck at 42 or 43 percent of the vote, which is not quite enough, and which leaves President Bush an opening.
This situation means that it is possible, though unlikely, that Bush could get fewer popular votes than Clinton but still squeeze out an Electoral College victory. Not since 1888 has the popular vote loser won the presidency. And it also raises the prospect that, for the first time in at least a generation, the voters could re-elect a president even though a majority of them neither like nor admire him.
Ronald Reagan had a high approval rating and even higher personal popularity in 1984. Richard Nixon was never a beloved figure, but his job approval rating was positive in 1972. Dwight Eisenhower was enormously popular in 1956.
George Bush is not. The most recent surveys show that more people disapprove of how he is handling the presidency than approve it. And though Bush is not hated as Nixon or Lyndon Johnson were at times, or scorned as Jimmy Carter was toward the end of his term, the disapproval has lately been joined by noticeable dislike.
But he still could win by getting just enough voters to reject Clinton. If so, the public might be relieved Wednesday morning about escaping a Clinton presidency. But it would hardly be happy about the prospect of another four years of Bush.
This would especially be the case if Bush won even while getting fewer popular votes than Clinton. And though they would never admit it, the President`s senior advisers provided some evidence over the weekend that they did not really expect Bush to get more votes than Clinton.
They began to talk about how they could stitch together an Electoral College victory. This scenario, last heard during Michael Dukakis` campaign, is the refuge of people who doubt that their candidate will win the popular vote contest.
The latest CNN-USA Today poll, released Sunday, gave Clinton a 43-to-36 percent lead over Bush among likely voters, with independent Ross Perot at 15 percent. Then, using a formula for allocating the undecided vote based on past behavior-which may or may not apply this time-that poll projected a final 49 to 37 percent Clinton margin.
A New York Times-CBS News poll showed Clinton ahead by 43 percent to 34 percent. The survey by ABC News showed a closer race, with Clinton ahead by only 42 percent to 37 percent.
Forgetting the much-discussed ”gaps” in the polls, a cross-section of the national and statewide surveys, public and private, indicates that slightly more than 40 percent of the people have pretty much made up their minds to vote for Clinton, while 35 percent have decided on Bush and about 15 percent are for Perot.
Those first two numbers are likely to rise as the 8 to 10 percent who are undecided make their final choices. But if history and common sense are any guide, Perot`s support will drop as some people decide to use their vote to choose a president rather than express themselves.
That would put perhaps another 5 percent of the electorate into the ranks of the undecided. Add the real undecideds and a few who are casually decided, and 15 to 17 percent of the people are ”in play,” as the jargon has it.
Clinton would need only about a third of them to get to the 47 or 48 percent needed for a popular plurality, and the Electoral College majority which would probably come with it. Bush would need to get at least two-thirds of them.
Historically, undecideds split almost 2 to 1 against the incumbent, making Bush`s task even more daunting. But voters are not bound by history, and these voters are not easy to predict.
Most of them are neither partisans nor ideologues, or they would have committed themselves weeks ago. Most of them, polls indicate, want change, which would indicate that they would choose Clinton.
But they haven`t chosen him yet, perhaps because there is something about him that they don`t like. This explains why Bush has done little for the last week except bash the Democrat. He has to keep reminding undecided voters why they haven`t yet made their commitment to Clinton.
In the process, he risked reminding them why they wanted change to begin with. But considering the arithmetic facing him, that`s a risk he had to take.
