Forbes Leads Dole In New Poll But Another Poll Shows Him Losing Ground

Insurgent Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes, racing to maintain his momentum here three weeks before primary day, declared Monday he had reached a “very encouraging” turning point. One new poll showed him pulling ahead of Sen. Bob Dole, but a second showed him losing some ground.

With three weeks to go before the Feb. 20 primary, the millionaire Forbes campaigned here as the champion of the two-income, middle-class family in a pitch delivered in the ballroom of the Nashua Country Club. After winning cheers for his flat tax plan from a Rotary group of business people, Forbes told a pack of reporters who trailed him: “We will win some early contests … I will win the nomination.”

Forbes, who is here amid efforts to build up his ground organization, arrived just as a survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for People and the Press said Forbes was leading Dole by 29-24 percent in New Hampshire, with the rest of the field well behind. The survey of 543 likely GOP primary voters, which had a margin of error of plus of minus 5 percentage points, was taken after Dole’s widely criticized response last week to President Clinton’s State of the Union address.

Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, said the survey underscored how weak Dole has become. “Forbes is serving to galvanize anti-Dole sentiment much the way Ross Perot galvanized anti-Bush sentiment four years ago,” Kohut said.

However, the poll was immediately controversial.

In a dramatic example of the way polls based on different assumptions can produce different results, a survey by the New Hampshire-based American Research Group said that Forbes’ support has begun to drop. That poll said Dole is steady at 33 percent, Forbes is at 16, followed by Patrick Buchanan at 15, and Sen. Phil Gramm and Lamar Alexander at 7 percent.

The American Research Group said the Pew methodology was based on a scenario that has never happened in New Hampshire: that an enormous number of independent voters would declare themselves to be Republican on primary day and vote for Forbes.