BOTH PARTIES MOBILIZING FORCES TO GET OUT THE VOTE.

Byline: Robin Toner The New York Times

The final 10 days of the 1996 campaign are shaping up as a furious struggle by the two parties and their allies to get their supporters to the polls, in the face of widespread indications that sagging voter interest may well diminish turnout.

Strategists say that fears on both sides are legitimate after a lopsided and largely static presidential campaign. Democrats worry that President Clinton's comfortable lead in the polls will cause many would-be supporters to think he no longer needs their votes; Republicans fear that Bob Dole's troubled campaign will so dispirit many of the party faithful that they will simply stay home. In either case, it is the struggle for control of the House of Representatives that could be most affected, many analysts say.

Mary Crawford, press secretary for the Republican National Committee, said, ``It's totally fair to say that the party, on a national and state level, will be donating unprecedented resources to turning out our voters this year.''

Democrats make similar vows. ``We saw in 1994 the results of low turnout,'' said David Eichenbaum, the Democratic National Committee's director of communications. ``We lost a number of races by very close margins that had everything to do with turnout and resulted in a Republican Congress that tried to gut a lot of important priorities.''

The final drives by the parties and their allied interest groups are well under way, often based on extensive research to identify probable supporters and find the appeals most likely to get them to the polls. This weekend, Democrats are holding rallies and distributing leaflets directed at women from the soccer fields of suburban Baltimore to the Wal-Marts of Georgia. The AFL-CIO has sent 1,000 fresh troops into the field to help unions coordinate the endgame of their effort to oust the Republican House; labor volunteers distributed 100,000 pieces of literature to union members on a single day last week in Washington State.

On the conservative side, the Christian Coalition is distributing 45 million voter guides through 120,000 churches, as well as running get-out-the-vote commercials on Christian radio outlets and getting in touch with more than three million voters by letter, phone and personal visits.

Ralph Reed, executive director of the coalition, says his voters will know the stakes. ``It would be the end of the world to core religious conservatives if Dick Gephardt became speaker or Tom Daschle became majority leader,'' he said. ``It would make it impossible to move any pro-family legislation through Congress for the foreseeable future, and that's why I'm predicting the largest turnout by religious conservatives ever in a presidential election.''

Still, when it comes to the electorate at large, many analysts say poll data indicate voters are much less interested in this campaign than they were in the battle between Bill Clinton and President Bush four years ago. For example, the most recent New York Times/CBS News Poll found that 39 percent said they would describe this race as interesting, compared with 78 percent who felt that way about the presidential campaign in October 1992. Another indicator is the decline in audiences for the debates and the conventions this year compared with 1992.

Experts cite several reasons for the shrinking interest: the seeming lack of competition in the presidential race; the relatively healthy economy, compared with the recessionary days of 1992; and the low-key nature of the Ross Perot campaign, in contrast to the interest and excitement he generated four years ago. Thomas Patterson, the Benjamin C. Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, said the lack of interest might be less a sign of troubled politics than of comparatively untroubled times. ``It's an incumbent running for re-election when the economy looks pretty good and the world seems to be pretty much in control,'' he said.

As a result, some analysts say this year's turnout might be closer to that of 1988, which was 50.1 percent of the voting-age population, than of 1992, which was 55.2 percent.

But there are other analysts who disagree, and maintain that broader, structural forces - like the aging of the baby boomers - will push for a higher turnout.

And there are some wild cards. This is the first presidential election since the National Voter Registration Act, known as the motor-voter law, went into effect. A study released this month on the impact of that law, which was intended to make it easier to register to vote, projected that as of June 30, nine million additional voters had been added to the rolls since the law went into effect in January 1995.

The report, by a nonprofit group called Human Serve, projected that the law, which requires states to permit registration by mail, at welfare and motor-vehicle offices and other state agencies, would result in the largest two-year increase ever in the number of registered voters.

But there are skeptics who wonder whether the final tally will actually be that high; Curtis Gans, who heads the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, said he expected final figures to fall ``well short'' of the Human Serve totals.

And some political scientists question whether those newly registered voters actually will vote. When more effort is involved in registering, these analysts say, it is more likely to indicate that those registering actually intend to show up on Election Day.

The pressing political question is just who would gain an advantage from a lower turnout. Andrew Kohut, a pollster at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said: ``All of my experience indicates lower turnout helps Republicans. But we are seeing in our typology that many of the moderate Republicans and populist Republicans are conflicted about their choices. And when people are conflicted about their choices and uninspired about the top of the ticket, they can stay home rather than make the choice for Clinton.''

This uncertainty has fueled the two parties' efforts to mobilize their voters. An example is the Democrats' focus on women, who tilt overwhelmingly toward that party in both the race for the presidency and the battle for the House, according to the New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Gans maintains that the most important factor on Election Day may well be the percentage of female voters: In 1992, 54 percent of the people who voted were women, and in 1994, 51 percent, according to surveys of people leaving the polls.