Too early to panic: the Bush team has a handle on the situation.(Campaign 2004)

'THE only poll that matters is on Election Day," the trailing candidate typically asserts; but the polling eight months before Election 2004 has mattered, in contributing to the gloomy mood among many of President Bush's supporters. Most polls since late January have the president tied with or trailing John Kerry, and Bush campaign strategists counsel Republicans to get used to it because they don't expect a better showing until the fall. Campaign officials have launched their offensive against Kerry, even as some conservatives look for silver linings in a Bush defeat and the "Key Republicans" who "Admit Anxiety Over Campaign" make headlines.

As the battle is joined, there's trouble brewing in GOP ranks. Following weeks of Republican nail-biting over White House missteps ranging from the National Guard controversy and overblown predictions in the president's Economic Report to the administration's botched nomination of a manufacturing guru, supporters are now wondering whether the re-elect campaign, too, is stumbling.

A group of prominent Republicans who went to Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters for a recent meeting--designed to arm them with a winning campaign message--left the briefing decidedly off-message. It was "very discouraging," according to a participant. One depressed veteran of past campaigns reported, "It felt like 1992." Others said that the only strategy they could discern was lowering expectations about the president's poll standing for the next six months--which, the attendees fear, could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It wouldn't be the first time that George W. Bush benefited from low expectations, but in the past it was his opponents who were discounting his prospects; it could prove difficult to energize a base disheartened by low expectations arising from White House actions and bad poll numbers month after month.

Interviews with senior campaign and party officials, however, indicate that a fuller picture of the state of the campaign could go a long way toward reassuring the worried troops. Ralph Reed, a regional chairman for the campaign, rejects the 1992 comparison out of hand. He points out that this President Bush's approval rating is about 50 percent, in contrast to his father's 41 percent twelve years ago, and he faces neither a primary challenge nor an independent candidate pulling voters from his base. Reed explains that, with these conditions in place, every incumbent president since World War II has been reelected. In March 1992, 79 percent thought the country was on the "wrong track," while polls this month peg that number at 54 percent. In February, consumer confidence was at 93.1, significantly higher than the 68.8 in 1992.

Reed doesn't dispute the campaign's expectation of discouraging head-to-head polls over the coming months. He thinks it's important for conservatives "to know what we're up against." He predicts a "very, very tough election against a team that is out of power in the Senate, House, and presidency, so they are very focused." But he warns conservatives not to buy into the hype about the opposing team. For example, those angry Bush-hating Democratic voters wound up not having the energy and commitment so frequently attributed to them: The turnout of voters through Super Tuesday this year was the third lowest since 1960. Reed calculates that 2.4 million fewer people voted in 30 Democratic primaries and caucuses through Super Tuesday than voted in only 22 Republican contests in 2000.

Reed points out that President Bush has been on the receiving end of $40 million in critical Democratic ads, and that "all the earned media has gone their way" owing to negative coverage from the David Kay WMD report, the rising deficit numbers, and poor job-creation numbers. Reed notes that the current polls reflect an unsustainably low disapproval rating for John Kerry because, during the Democratic primaries, "Dean took all the hits and Kerry just steered around the wreckage."

By the time Bill Clinton secured the nomination after tough primaries in 1992, his negative rating was roughly equal to his positive rating--which, according to Reed, indicated that his supporters would be difficult to dislodge. Kerry enjoys a high positive-to-negative ratio, 60 percent to 26 percent in one recent poll, which Reed laughingly guarantees will not be the case come Election Day; and even with that artificial sweetener of a ...