Campaign 2000: Who Are McCain's Forces?

After the South Carolina blowout, the Bush camp was convinced it had put McCain away--made him just another of those short-lived New Hampshire specimens who wind up under glass in political-science labs. In fact, over the weekend Bush stopped talking about McCain entirely and turned his focus to Al Gore. Some advisers were telling him as late as Tuesday morning that he would win Michigan by 5 points or more. When the results came in and McCain had triumphed, Bush was furious. Instead of a gracious concession speech, of the kind he gave in New Hampshire, Bush was as defiant as McCain was after losing South Carolina. Bush railed against McCain's tactics and blamed the loss on Democrats who crossed over and voted for McCain in order to "hijack the election."

But there was more to McCain's win than that, and it wasn't until later in the week when the pros could do some forensic work that Republican insiders began to whisper about how badly it had really gone for Bush in the biggest and most representative arena so far. Once again, primary turnout was extraordinarily high. Michigan veterans couldn't believe the numbers when they learned that 1.3 million people had voted, compared with a typical 500,000. At least four counties had to turn on the photocopy machines, make additional ballots and number them by hand. And John McCain won every one of those counties.

Bush's defenders argued that the reason McCain won 70 of Michigan's 83 counties was Democrats, who were meddling in G.O.P. politics but would never vote for a Republican in the fall. But the biggest increases in turnout actually came in longtime Republican areas in the rural West and Southwest, where few Democrats live. Even Bush partisans in Michigan got the shivers at this. "A lot of this is Republicans talking," said one. Ed Sarpolus, vice president of EPIC/MRA, a Lansing-based research firm, did a telephone poll on the day of the vote, and believes that Republicans voted in much higher numbers than the exit polls indicated--60%, not 48%. In his surveys, McCain got 37% of the Republican vote, not 29%, as the Voter News Service reported.

While Bush did well among older, traditional Republican women, McCain attracted blue-collar men and, more striking, family values-oriented women, who are worried about the moral tone of the country for their kids. The voters who say issues mattered more went for Bush; the ones who say character counts went for McCain. The ones who value Republican loyalty went for Bush; those who prefer candidates not tied to party leaders liked McCain. Tax cutters went for Bush, Social Security savers for McCain.

Is this real, the makings of a new Republican coalition? When he asked them, around 60% of the Democrats told Sarpolus that next November, they would continue to vote for McCain over Gore, as did two-thirds of the independents. "This is very significant," said Sarpolus. "This is a true general-election coalition."

If Sarpolus is right, it goes straight to the heart of the Republican fight: Should the party be trying to expand, with the diluted purity that would entail, or should it keep its current profile and run the risk of winning only 40% of the vote in presidential contests? A McCain backer put it in distinctly G.O.P. terms: "Is this a country club or a public course?"