For McCain, Numbers Game Isn’t Adding Up

The road to the White House just got a lot steeper for John McCain and his Straight Talk Express.

After being shut out in three contests Tuesday, the senator from Arizona risks effective elimination from the Republican race if he fails to capture at least one of the big prizes--New York, Ohio or California--in the next round of voting.

The main problem he faces is the changed nature of the Republican race and the more restrictive balloting that will make it harder for McCain’s appeal to Democrats and independents to pay off in most states.

Until now, the contest has been a series of discrete and almost disconnected events--the Iowa caucuses, primaries in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan--each fought on their own distinct terms.

Week by week, each cliffhanger became a drama worthy of an old-time serial. The winner was rewarded with a splash of publicity, a morale boost and a jolt of momentum that lingered until the next installment.

But now the contests start falling in huge clumps and the intangible benefits give way to the only thing that counts from now on: winning delegates.

And the rules for awarding those delegates, with core Republicans growing increasingly influential, strongly favor Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

“The deck has been stacked against [McCain] for some time and now it’s even more so,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran GOP strategist who remains unaligned in the party fight.

On Tuesday, California and 11 other states will vote, choosing nearly 60% of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination. A week later, voters in another six states, including giants Texas and Florida, go to the polls. After that round, the nominating fight should be mathematically decided.

Given Bush’s advantages in his home state of Texas and Florida, where his brother is governor, as well as the huge lead he now enjoys in the race for California delegates, it becomes difficult to see how the spread-thin McCain can prevail without another miracle comeback.

Still, it is a measure of this most uncertain campaign season that few brush off the possibility. “He’s gone much farther that almost anybody figured he could,” Ayres noted. “One dismisses him at their peril.”

Ever irrepressible, McCain made the same point Wednesday, a day after being walloped by Bush in Virginia, North Dakota and Washington state. “The establishment is intent on breaking me, but we’re going to win this thing,” he insisted at a morning rally in Riverside.

In a day of campaigning that took his Straight Talk Express bus from the Inland Empire to Orange County’s Little Saigon, McCain toned down his criticism of leaders of the Christian Right, whom he earlier attacked as “evil” and “agents of intolerance.”

His comments drew an embarrassing rebuke from conservative activist Gary Bauer, who has endorsed McCain and initially stood by his criticisms of the Rev. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.

“I must in the strongest possible terms repudiate Sen. McCain’s unwarranted, ill-advised and divisive attacks on certain religious leaders,” Bauer said in a statement. “Sen. McCain must not allow his personal differences with any individual to cloud his judgment.”

McCain made clear Wednesday he would continue to condemn Robertson and Falwell, though he insisted the use of the word “evil” was a joke and apologized. He also promised a more issue-oriented approach.

“It’s time we started talking about Social Security, the surplus, Medicare, foreign policy, how we’re going to restore the military,” McCain said. “I’m going to focus, frankly, my campaign rather than respond to continued assaults on my character. The people of this country deserve a campaign based on the issues. And that’s what I’m going to try to give them.”

Across the country, Bush called Tuesday’s three-state sweep a portent of things to come.

“I intend to consolidate the party and consolidate the base and reach out to independents and Democrats,” Bush said at a news conference in suburban Atlanta. “Step one is to earn the nomination. When I’m nominated, I will reach out to independents and Democrats who have not participated in our primaries.”

For now, however, he kept his eye on McCain, picking up the theme of his scolding victory speech Tuesday night. He said McCain “should be ashamed” for condoning “Catholic voter alert” calls that publicized Bush’s visit to controversial Bob Jones University.

And Bush said it was wrong of McCain to compare Falwell and Robertson to black activists Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan. It was “a reach,” the governor said.

“Farrakhan preaches hate. He is a hateful person who has preached an anti-Semitic message which is ugly. All of us ought to reject the politics of Louis Farrakhan.”

Behind the rhetoric lies a simple reality: the Republican race has become a numbers game, a race to reach the magic total of 1,034 committed delegates. And the problem for McCain is equally clear-cut: only votes cast in Republican primaries count toward delegates.

For a time that didn’t matter much. In Michigan, tens of thousands of independents and cross-over Democrats swarmed the polling places, overwhelming Bush’s Republican support and helping McCain battle back from a big loss in South Carolina.

But from here out the dynamic changes in most states. In some--Ohio, Missouri and Georgia on Tuesday, for instance--Democrats are holding primaries at the same time. That reduces the temptation for partisans to cross over or for independents to flood the GOP primary.

In other states, such as New York, participation is limited strictly to party loyalists. And McCain has consistently lost the Republican vote to Bush--save in New Hampshire--often by huge margins.

The rules in California are even more byzantine. Under the blanket primary, any voter can support any candidate, regardless of affiliation. But only Republican votes will be used to apportion Republican delegates and the winner will take all 162, nearly one-sixth the total needed for nomination.

In Riverside on Wednesday, McCain urged Democrats and independents to turn out regardless of those rules, seeking a popular-vote victory that will “send a message not only throughout America, but throughout the world.”

But the message that matters more is the one transmitted to Philadelphia, where Republican delegates will be seated in July to pick the party’s nominee.

Simply put, McCain needs to start winning delegates and needs to do more Tuesday than just pick off a few New England states where he seems to run strongest.

“If he can’t do that,” said Kieran Mahoney, a nonaligned New York Republican strategist, “he’s going to face a mathematical problem.”

The opinion polls hardly bode well; McCain is trailing Bush virtually everywhere outside New York and New England. If McCain is forced from the race--and that may be looking too far ahead--some have already started musing over how McCain would make his exit.

“What does he say?” wondered Republican pollster Ayres. “Does he bow out graciously and say he looks forward to working for the Republican ticket? Or does he give a speech like he gave in South Carolina”--an acrid address following his loss--”and start flirting with the Reform Party? That’s a fascinating question to me.”

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Times staff writers T. Christian Miller and Robert A. Rosenblatt contributed to this story.