Too early to panic: the Bush team has a handle on the situation.

'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 disproportionately positive rating he is essentially only tied with the president. "Where will he be in the polls when his favorability rating is 50 percent?" Reed asks. As recently as late November, observers blamed Kerry's "deep political problems" for his lagging behind Howard Dean in Massachusetts among Democratic voters he has represented for 19 years. In a recent Gallup poll, 9 out of 10 Bush supporters described themselves as pro-Bush rather than anti-Kerry. Only 6 in 10 of his opponent's supporters are pro-Kerry rather than anti-Bush.

Bush-Cheney campaign manager Ken Mehlman might have boosted the spirits of those discouraged Republican surrogates had he met with them. He explains that the president's political team has been working behind the scenes over the past three years to set up this race, so that "eight months before the election we're ahead of where we were one month before in 2000." The 37-year-old Baltimore native, who was national field director of the 2000 campaign, left his position as director of political affairs at the White House last May to run the campaign. After graduating from Harvard, Mehlman practiced law for a few years before joining a series of campaigns, including Sen. Phil Gramm's in 1996. Mehlman was chief of staff for Texas congresswoman Kay Granger, and had a reputation for being smart, disciplined, and knowledgeable about both policy and politics, when the Bush 2000 campaign tapped him to come to Austin.

Mehlman sees the campaign he's running--with its sharp ideological differences from the Democrats, its unprecedented grassroots effort, and its goal of electing Republicans at all levels--as the kind of campaign conservatives have wanted to run for 25 years. He emphasizes that the campaign has raised, and saved, the resources it will need to remain on the offensive until November. He explains that George W. Bush is the first president in history to have a working precinct organization in place eight months before the election. The campaign has trained 11,000 precinct chairmen and lined up 222,000 "team leaders." There are 6 million Bush campaign "e-activists"--ten times the number Howard Dean recruited online. Mehlman pores over weekly status reports from 19 battleground states to judge the progress being made in organizing volunteers and registering voters.

In 2000, 63 electoral votes were decided by a total of 25,000 votes. Republicans view their wins in 2002 as a payoff for the resources and effort devoted to their "72-hour project" to mobilize voters in the final days of a campaign. Even more attention to identifying, registering, and mobilizing voters this year could--according to GOP studies--be worth three to four points: the margin of victory in a close race. Recognizing that half of all Republicans don't live in strong GOP precincts, Mehlman explains that the campaign has examined reams of consumer data for information on everything from magazine subscriptions to gun ownership and church attendance to identify potential Republican voters. GOP chairman Ed Gillespie anticipates that Republicans will have the largest grassroots operation in history, and pledges to register 3 million new voters by November--with specific goals in states that Bush won or lost narrowly in 2000.

In paid and earned media every week until Election Day, Republicans will be telling voters, "Our ideas are right, his are wrong," and expect that when Kerry defends himself he'll sound like he's flip-flopping. The campaign believes that the "liberal" label is "less instructive" than specific criticisms of Kerry's positions and record. The "Steady Leadership in Times of Change" tagline on the Bush ads refers to what Karen Hughes calls the "fault line" of 9/11: The charge is that Democrats haven't adjusted to either the new national-security challenges we face or the demands of the modern economy.

Mehlman scoffs at the notion that should the president lose, there could be compensating GOP congressional wins in 2006. "Winning is a habit in politics, so is losing," he declares, and predicts that the losing party this year will turn inward and be divided and angry. As long as Republicans don't get that way before November, President Bush should be favored for re-election, despite what the polls might be saying.