McCain Voters May Turn Out to Be Ghost Army

Watch the Republicans and Democrats at work these days, and you might think the independent voters who backed John McCain are the soccer moms of campaign 2000: powerful, numerous and the key to victory come November.

The trouble is, growing evidence suggests there is no McCain vote. Polls show most of those who backed the Arizona senator have already split evenly among the presumptive presidential nominees, Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.

Instead, the real dogfight is over the small percentage of “true independents”--no more than 10% to 15% of McCain’s supporters--who are still undecided.

“The true independent McCain voter, the people who truly are swing voters, are going to be critical” to winning the November election, said Stuart Rothenberg, a political analyst. “But that’s only a slice of the McCain vote.”

That’s not to say Texas Gov. Bush and Vice President Gore are wasting their time in chasing the true independents. But many analysts and pollsters question whether McCain will have any ability to deliver those voters to Bush. True independents are unlikely to be swayed by an endorsement or any particular platform, experts say.

“The choices [McCain voters] are going to make about Bush or Gore aren’t seen through the prism of what John McCain stood for,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.

“There isn’t really a McCain voter, so to speak,” Kohut said. “His constituency was a personal one.”

Ray Wolfinger, a UC Berkeley professor who co-authored a book called “The Myth of the Independent Voter,” said the nature of true independents--those with a variegated voting history--makes them difficult to influence.

Certain issues, such as a failing economy or a significant scandal, can sway the bloc. But with no controversies raging in either foreign or domestic affairs, the true independents this year are likely to base their voting decisions more on the emotion of the race than any other factor.

McCain’s endorsement, which Bush is seeking, or a devotion to his campaign finance reform agenda, as Gore is professing, will probably not have much impact, Wolfinger said.

Instead, the most likely scenario, based on historical trends, is that true independents will vote for whoever happens to be the front-runner in the days immediately before the Nov. 7 election day.

“If they really are independent, they’ll go whichever way most people go,” Wolfinger said.

Another question is whether the independent voters will turn out at all, as they did during the primary process, or simply stay at home. Overall, these voters tend to be apolitical.

While McCain frequently claimed he brought in new voters, most pundits believe he brought in independents who were new to the primary process; in other words, people who would normally vote in a general election, but not in a party-based contest.

If the truly independent voters are now turned off at seeing their candidate lose, or are disenchanted with the current race, they may choose not to vote at all.

“The question is do they grudgingly return or do they stay home?” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster. “They are the core in the middle that could be decisive in a very close race . . . they’re not that large a bloc, but any bloc is significant when you’re talking about victory at the margins.”

Still another question on the true independents is whether they will embrace the Reform Party, as many of them did during the 1992 election, when Ross Perot drew 19% of the popular vote.

With the economy humming and the group’s leadership in disarray, however, most analysts expect the party to attract only hardcore partisans committed to Perot or the party’s likely nominee, conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan.

“I don’t see a Buchanan-led Reform Party as being able to take advantage of whatever dissatisfaction there is out there with the status quo,” Rothenberg said.

Despite polls that show most voters have already chosen either Bush or Gore, the two men are pursuing McCain’s support by slapping the “reform” buzzword on everything from education to Social Security to campaign financing.

Both men called McCain last month, Gore to let McCain know about his new campaign finance reform plan and Bush to begin the process of nailing down McCain’s endorsement.

So far, the Bush vs. Gore showdown for McCain’s votes has been a draw. Bush topped Gore among former McCain supporters in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup last month, 47% to 41%, with a 6-point margin of error. But in a poll conducted the same day by Newsweek, the numbers flip-flopped to have Gore in the lead, 48% to 41%, with a 4-point margin of error.

The even match, many analysts and pollsters now believe, is a sign that McCain’s voters were mostly people disaffected with the political system--but not so disaffected as to abandon the party they usually choose at the ballot box.

Take Marianne Pripps and Greg Harry. Both are independents who cast ballots in California’s primary for the former Vietnam War hero because he seemed bent on shaking up the establishment. Both paid less attention to McCain’s policies, and more to his outsider stance.

Now, both are leaning in the same direction they usually vote. And both say McCain’s endorsement will do little to influence their decisions.

Pripps, a 44-year-old interpreter who lives in Fremont and usually votes Democratic, said she is still undecided. But she dislikes Bush’s opposition to abortion rights and distrusts some of his stands: “He says a lot of things that I believe have been a product of coaching. Now, he has to try to move to the center. So far, he hasn’t done that.”

Harry, a 39-year-old investment banker from Dana Point, usually votes Republican and is leaning toward Bush. “The election is for Bush to lose,” Harry said.

For his part, McCain believes pollsters have failed to correctly interpret his surge. He points to the thousands of people who registered to vote for the first time in the New Hampshire primary as proof that he was able to draw a larger, and more truly independent, body of voters than previously existed.

And while he harbors no illusions that he is able to control that bloc--there’s a reason they’re called independents--he believes his message of campaign finance reform won broad support.

“I believe there’s a whole lot more volatility out there among independents,” McCain said in a recent interview.

“There’s a growing number of them that are truly independent, that find discomfort in both parties and that therefore will swing in large numbers one way or the other depending on the candidate,” McCain said.

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Times Washington bureau chief Doyle McManus contributed to this story.