AS HE DEPARTED LAST WEEK FROM A PRESIdential race he had never quite entered, Colin Powell was careful not to rule out a career in politics somewhere down the line. "The future is the future,'' he said. Well, it used to be. By the very fact of Powell's absence, the future is suddenly looking a lot like the past. Dole vs. Clinton, the '96 matchup that seemed inevitable until Powell made it seem otherwise, is back again in its familiar guise as Most Likely Scenario. It's a whole old ball game.
Or is it? For the moment, most of the Americans who flocked to Powell will retreat to their political default mode. Powell Republicans are reclaimed mostly by Robert Dole. Powell Democrats drift back to Bill Clinton. But having been beguiled by the dream of a third way, voters won't go happily, and quite a few will be ready to run off again with any newcomer who talks their language. Take your pick. Newt Gingrich, Jesse Jackson, Ross Perot or one of his surrogates. Some late bloomer in the New Hampshire primary field. It will be a while before the restless American electorate has sorted out its discontents and settled on its candidates.
With so many voters seated uncomfortably in the slots labeled Clinton and Dole, TIME and the Cable News Network are embarking on an ambitious new kind of political poll. For the TIME/CNN Election Monitor, pollsters from Yankelovich Partners have 4,787 registered voters, an especially large sample that permits a high degree of accuracy. Between now and the 1996 election they will return to those same individuals to chart the fluctuation of their views. At each juncture TIME and CNN reporters will also talk to some of them in greater detail to see what's on their minds and how it affects their judgment of the candidates.
Their message now? Twelve months before the election, as they are just beginning to focus on presidential politics, voters are having second thoughts about the Republican revolution that was ushered in just last year. The poll results underscored the results of last week's elections, where Democrats held ground in places they had lost badly in recent years. In Kentucky, where Clinton bashing was a foolproof formula in the '94 congressional races, it didn't work for G.O.P. gubernatorial candidate Larry Forgy. The winner was Democratic Lieutenant Governor Paul Patton, who turned the tables and made Newt Gingrich the boogeyman in his campaign. In Virginia, Republicans were stopped just short of gaining control of the state legislature for the first time ever.
Republicans could still brag about the re-election of Mississippi's first-term G.O.P. Governor Kirk Fordice. And this week's gubernatorial election in Louisiana could well go to Republican Mike Foster, consolidating the G.O.P. march across the South. But what last week's voting hints at--the return of a detectable pulse among the Democrats--the Election Monitor picks up loud and clear. In nearly every region of the country, Clinton is favored over Dole. What's more surprising, voters prefer Democrats to Republicans as their choice for Congress, 45% to 41%, a reversal of the standings in 1994. You could call that the makings of a comeback. Or you could say that one year after the Republicans roared into Washington, G.O.P. fang baring has alienated nearly as many voters as Democratic business as usual once did, only faster.