POLL: NUMBERS HAVEN'T BUDGED : INCUMBENT RETAINS STRONG LEAD.

Byline: Richard L. Berke The New York Times

After the costliest presidential competition in history, after months of stumping and an often scalding shower of commercials, the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll shows that the electoral picture in the closing days is virtually unchanged from the start of the race.

Despite the ferocity of Bob Dole's attacks on President Clinton's public ethics, Clinton continues to hold a commanding lead. Fewer than 10 percent of the voters polled said concerns about ethical issues had caused them to change their votes.

Thirteen months ago, Clinton's job performance rating turned more approving than disapproving, and it has remained so since. In that same period, Clinton's favorableness rating - voters are asked if their overall opinion of each candidate is favorable or unfavorable - has consistently been more positive than negative, while the rating for Dole, the Republican candidate, has been the reverse.

Without a single vote counted, Clinton's advisers, and even many Republicans, have already moved from dwelling on whether Clinton will win to arguing that the biggest remaining mystery is by what margin. Senior White House aides described the president as preoccupied with breaking the 50 percent mark in the popular vote, allowing him to declare something of a mandate for his second term if he wins on Tuesday.

If he falls short, they said, Republicans, particularly if they manage to retain control of Congress, will be all the more energetic in their inquiries into the ethical controversies that have enveloped the White House.

In 1992, Clinton won with only 43 percent. If he is re-elected and again does not reach 50 percent, he would be the first president since Woodrow Wilson to win two terms with less than a majority of the vote. Wilson, who was elected in 1912 and again in 1916, also had third-party rivals.

The Times/CBS Poll of 1,519 registered voters nationwide, taken Wednesday through Saturday, found that Clinton was teetering at that 50 percent threshold. Among the probable electorate, 50 percent said they would vote for Clinton, while 34 percent favored Dole and 8 percent were for Ross Perot, the Reform Party candidate. Seven percent said they were undecided.

To the consternation of Dole and his lieutenants, those numbers have barely changed since October 1995. They are subject to a sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, leaving Clinton's true support as high as 53 percent or as low as 47 percent.

While the poll found that the ethical debate of the last campaign days, with Republicans accusing the White House of taking dirty campaign money, was not affecting Clinton's standing, some leading Democrats said the longer the questions lingered, the more concerned they were growing about his margin.

``If I was in the White House, I'd be praying for the finish line,'' said Robert Strauss, a former Democratic Party chairman who supports Clinton but is a longtime friend of Dole.

Yet given the hearty economy and the fact that Clinton managed to discourage any challenger in the primaries, Dole never had much of a chance, Strauss said. ``This year was probably preordained,'' he said. ``The only real surprise of the year was there was no challenge to the president. We always destroy our incumbents if we possibly can.''

Indeed, Scott Reed, Dole's campaign manager, offered a pre-Election-Day autopsy of his own campaign in Monday's edition of The New Yorker. ``The truth is, nothing has changed for a long time - four or five months,'' the article quotes him as saying. ``We were never able to jolt the race. We thought we jolted it when he left the Senate. Then we thought we jolted it with our convention. But we didn't, and we had a string of bad luck.''