Has Yeltsin Lost Steam?

In basketball, "finishers" are the ones that win. Anyone can make a good move to the basket, but finishers make a good move and make the basket. Many teams in the American NBA are good for three quarters, but finishers are those teams that play best in the fourth quarter. The Chicago Bulls are finishers; the Orlando Magic are not.


Will Yeltsin and his campaign team emerge as finishers, or will they fade down the stretch? While Yeltsin's campaign has been brilliant through the first three quarters, his team must overcome several potential pitfalls in the last quarter to finish the campaign.


So far, team Yeltsin has executed a brilliant campaign. After a false start under Oleg Soskovets in January, Yeltsin turned to liberals Anatoly Chubais, Sergei Filatov, Igor Malashenko and his own daughter to assume control of his re-election campaign. Guided by this new team, the president's revamped campaign sought first to consolidate the reformist vote behind Yeltsin by polarizing the election and neutralizing "Third Force" candidates. This task accomplished, the campaign's second stage was devoted to convincing "centrist" voters that Yeltsin was the lesser of two evils whose re-election would not produce a new unstable, revolutionary situation while a vote for Zyuganov would.


Even Yeltsin's opponents concede that the professionalism, organization and coordination of his campaign -- from direct mail efforts to the airing of popular, but anti-communist films on television -- has exceeded everyone's expectations.


But has the campaign been too successful, too fast? On the eve of the first round, Yeltsin campaign officials have begun to worry that the campaign may have peaked too early. Here's a list of their concerns.


?Overexposure. Even the casual watcher of Russian television quickly feels the pressure of the Yeltsin campaign on every channel and in every kind of programming. Yeltsin is everywhere, all the time. Likewise, anti-communism, both the subtle and blunt forms, permeates the airwaves and print -- be it in the form of "Itogi" newscaster Yevgeny Kiselev comparing negotiations between Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, documentaries about the Bolshevik coup or the Stalinist terror, or the line-up of anti-communist films scheduled for evening viewing on ORT this week (culminating with Nikita Mikhalkov's "Burnt by the Sun"). Previous experiences with negative campaigning both in Russia (remember the anti-Zhirinovsky films from 1993) and elsewhere demonstrate conclusively that too much of a bad thing can have a reverse effect on voters.


?Momentum Loss. According to pollsters and officials in the presidential campaign, polls demonstrate giant local boosts in Yeltsin's popularity after he visits a given region. Their analyses also show, however, that these spikes of support taper after a few weeks and in some regions have even fallen.


?Gimmick Exhaustion. Without interruption, Yeltsin has launched a new initiative, signed a new major decree, and convened some major national or international event systematically throughout the entire campaign. Comparatively, the last two weeks have been rather quiet. Has the campaign ran out of tricks?


?The Moral Vote. Paradoxically, Yeltsin's surging in the polls and even a strong showing in the first round may hurt his chances for final victory. If, as polls demonstrate, most people already think that Yeltsin will win no matter what, then voters will no longer feel compelled to cast their ballots strategically, and instead will vote (as Yeltsin ads tell them to) from their heart. For those undecided voters, the intelligentsia, or supporters of the so-called "democratic opposition," this can mean voting for Yavlinsky or Lebed in the first round, and then voting for none of the above or not at all in the second round. To capture these kinds of voters, Yeltsin may be better off coming in second rather than first on June 16.


?The Dacha Crowd. According to estimates from the Yeltsin campaign team, nearly 20 percent of major urban populations go to the countryside during summer weekends. The absentee urban vote grows even larger in July when as high as 30 percent of urban workers plan their annual holidays. And unlike people in the countryside (Zyuganov supporters), urban residents tend to leave home when on vacation. The richer the urban dweller, the more likely they are to be out of town on Sunday and especially in July. It should go without saying that these kind of people are all Yeltsin supporters.


?Soccer. In the first round, the dacha problem is exacerbated by football. On Sunday night, Russia plays Germany in the European Cup, a match that as high as 50 percent of all Russian citizens are expected to watch. Weekend dacha warriors tend to return home on Sunday night even when the most important election in the history of this country is not taking place. But upon returning home, even if the intention of returning home early was to vote, the temptation to watch the game and blow off the trek to the polling station will be great. And if Russia loses (as they are expected to), the motivation to vote after a long drive home from the dacha and several drinks during the game, will be especially low for these potential Yeltsin supporters.


Despite all these late-in-the-game obstacles, Yeltsin at the end of the day is a finisher -- the Michael Jordan of Russian politics. Especially when the stakes are high, Yeltsin is at his best, as his string of electoral successes in 1989, 1990, 1991, and 1993 already demonstrate. His determined game face in the last weeks of the campaign is the look of a someone who likes the challenge of the fourth quarter and who wants to win, an attitude that Zyuganov does not exude. Expect a slam dunk or two (a deal with Lebed? or a communist street provocation?) before this game is over.





Michael McFaul is a senior associate at the Moscow Carnegie Center and professor of political science at Stanford University. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.