GOP Counting on Big Christian Right Voter Turnout

by Jim Lobe

The race is so close that Democrats are barely acknowledging the latest opinion polls that show that the majority of those surveyed want the President to stay the course.

Some two-thirds of those surveyed five days after the TV broadcast of President Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony on his affair with Monica Lewinsky, wanted Clinton to remain in office to serve out his term. And nearly 80 percent of respondents in a New York Times-CBS News poll said that the time, effort and money spent by independent counsel Kenneth Starr's four-year investigation of the president were a waste.

But the poll was based on a representative sample of the opinions of the general public, not on a sample of those who actually are planning to vote on Nov. 3 in this year's mid-term elections.

Of those considered "most likely" to actually cast ballots on voting day, fully 50 percent favored impeachment hearings, and a majority said they intended to vote for a Republican candidate for Congress. If those figures hold on election day, Republicans will strengthen their grasp on both houses of Congress.

Even in the most exciting presidential elections -- which take place every four years -- voter turnout in the past 30 years has never exceeded 56 percent of those eligible to cast a ballot.

Turnouts for mid-term elections -- when all 435 seats of the House of Representatives, one third of the Senate, many state governorships, and other state and local offices are up for grabs -- have not been greater than 38 percent. In 1994, when Republicans won control of the House of Representatives for the first time in almost 40 years, the turnout was a lowly 36 percent.

Republicans are hoping for even lower figures in November -- to below 35 percent, if possible -- according to political analysts who say the party which wins such elections is the one which is able to "mobilize its base" to turn out the vote.

For Republicans, the beauty of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is the outrage it has evoked in their most organized and most motivated partisans -- the Christian Right. "It's going to demoralize Democrats and (it) will get our base to turn out," said Gary Bauer, a Christian Right chief, at a meeting of the Christian Coalition earlier this month.

For these forces, Starr and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are not the relentless and self-righteous persecutors of a wounded but contrite president who is just trying to do his job, as a majority of the public sees it.

"They're the avenging angels, chosen by God himself to cast out the sinners and cleanse the sanctuary of state," according to one Congressional aide.

To ensure that these voters turn out five weeks from now, the Republicans must keep stoking their anger, presumably by releasing an endless stream of documents about Clinton's sexual peccadillos and prevarications -- even at the risk of turning off the much larger majority of citizens who, however, are unlikely to vote.

As a result, Republicans, who first justified their decision to release the Starr report and other scandal documents by saying that "the people should decide" the next steps, abruptly changed their tune after polls showed that Clinton's approval rating was virtually unchanged.

"I think people would be, frankly, horrified if the Congress was simply a polling institution that enacted a grotesque version of justice based on the latest polls or talk show," House Speaker and chief Republican strategist Newt Gingrich declared last week.

The message was clear: Republicans would continue their efforts to embarrass and humiliate the president so long as they believed that doing so would pay off in the Nov. 3 election, by keeping Democratic turnout low.

"When things happen that make one side's partisans unhappy, they stay home," Gingrich noted.

To counter this strategy, the Democrats obviously must try to motivate their own base, which consists primarily of women, African-Americans, and labor unions, say political analysts.

This effort effectively began last week, when leaders of all these constituencies, dangling the specter of Republican gains, called for their own "get-out-the-vote" campaigns. Republican success in increasing its hold on Congress could "roll back the progress women have made" under Clinton, warned Tipper Gore, wife of the vice president, speaking at a major women's luncheon.

Democrats are hoping, however, that the Republicans will overreach themselves in the campaign against Clinton, just as they did when they forced a government shutdown in a budget dispute with the president in 1995.

Polls showed that voters blamed Gingrich and his followers for the impasse, propelling Clinton back to the White House in 1996 along with a modest increase in the number of Democrats in Congress.

"The overreaching and unfairness of people who have no agenda other than to humiliate the president will do a lot to motivate our base," observed the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, David Leland.

National Democratic chairman Steve Grossman offered an even brighter prospect: "Good times create complacency and apathy, which are the enemies of our party. When things are good, people tend to stay home," he said. "Sometimes you need a crisis, an existential crisis, to motivate you."