TWO TOUGH FIGHTS FOR THE SENATE

Even with 34 Senate seats being contested this year, it is virtually impossible for Democrats to lose numerical control of the Senate. But there is a good chance that conservative Republicans will win enough seats to join with Southern Democrats and deprive moderates and liberals of ideological control. In California and Iowa, contests will have considerable impact on the complexion of the Senate that convenes next January. In both, liberally oriented Democrats could win if they attract enough votes to withstand the trend to Nixon. A look at the two campaigns:

IOWA: Avoiding an Avalanche

IN Iowa, where endless acres of plump corn awaited harvest last week, the GOP is looking forward to a bumper crop of its own. The latest polls give Richard Nixon a 2-to-l lead over Hubert Humphrey. The GOP also has hopes of capturing the Governor's mansion, both state houses, and six of Iowa's seven seats in the House of Representatives. To avert a total rout, dejected Democrats are looking to a lone champion, Governor Harold E. Hughes, 46, a craggy-jawed former truck driver who is battling hard to avoid being buried under an anti-Democratic avalanche.

During three terms as Governor, Hughes established himself both as an outstanding liberal and a formidable vote-getter. When he decided to run for the U.S. Senate at the urging of the late Robert Kennedy, Republican Incumbent Hickenlooper decided to retire. Pitted against Hughes, a genial 6-ft 2-in., 230-lb. giant, is moderate Republican David Stanley, 40, an able state legislator. At one point, Hughes looked like a sure bet. But he now figures he will need 150,000 to 200,000 votes from Republicans to save himself. Conceded Hughes last week: "It's going to require a lot of ballot crossing to do it."

Let's Pray. Hughes' approach to issues is often not exactly to lowans' taste. His advocacy of a bombing halt in North Viet Nam does not sit too well with Hawkeye State voters. Even placid Iowa is concerned about law and order. Stanley stresses law enforcement, "including civil rights laws," while Hughes underlines justice as a prerequisite. Nevertheless, lowans like their Governor's forthright ways, and this works in Hughes' favor. "I mainly talk from my gut," says Hughes. His often ragged syntax bears witness to a formal education that ended after a year of college, and he can cuss like a teamster. Once, local legend has it, he convened a meeting with the words: "All right, you sons of bitches, let's pray." He can also speak with a fervor honed by years as a Methodist lay preacher.

Hughes was raised according to stern fundamentalist precepts in Ida Grove (pop. 2,265) in western Iowa. During World War II he saw brutal front-line combat in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy. The war deeply unsettled him. "I was taught it was wrong to kill. But in the Army you're taught to kill in the most efficient manner. It was hard to reconcile this with my religious beliefs." Back home in Ida Grove, he became a truck driver--and a helpless drunk. One morning in 1952, Hughes came to in a Des Moines hotel with no inkling of how he got there and sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous. Nowadays, when he refuses a drink, he unhesitatingly explains why: "I'm an alcoholic." Even so, he campaigned to legalize the sale of liquor by the drink in 1962.

Hughes has not been shy about changing his mind in public, either. Once an enthusiastic supporter of Lyndon Johnson and his Viet Nam policies, he turned against the war last year. At the Chicago convention, Hughes nominated Eugene McCarthy even though he never did warm to the Minnesotan as a potential President. Hughes has since endorsed Humphrey while remaining an outspoken Viet Nam dove. In another switch, Hughes, a hunter from childhood and the owner of 30 guns, dropped his opposition to firearms controls after Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were murdered. He favors gun registration, tells outdoorsmen: "People who hunt should lead the way."

Mr. Clean. If Hughes is sometimes impulsive, his opponent is cool and calculating. A well-to-do lawyer from Muscatine, Stanley has a couple of set speeches that he delivers with identical gestures and inflections to Kiwanis meetings, kaffee-klatches, and even to undergraduates. Since announcing his candidacy in June 1967, Stanley has covered 100,000 miles in Iowa. In his smoothly engineered campaign, Stanley, a teetotaling, nonsmoking Methodist Sunday-school teacher, is being billed as "Mr. Clean."

His dour style has Hughes running hard--but not scared. "He has achieved a rare serenity," declares Park Rinard, executive director of the League of Iowa Municipalities and one of the Governor's close friends. "He hangs together and doesn't shred. I used to have to cheer him up. Now he cheers me up." With luck, he could do the same for Iowa's disheartened Democrats come November.

CALIFORNIA: Stirrings from Sleepy Hollow

IN 1962, California's consistently inconsistent voters managed to pick for high state offices two men who could hardly have been more dissimilar. They elected Democrat Alan Cranston, a quiet, professorial liberal, to a second term as controller. They chose Max Rafferty, a flamboyant right-wing spellbinder, to be superintendent of public instruction. This year, however, Californians can no longer have it both ways. Cranston and Rafferty are meeting head on in a bruising fight for the U.S. Senate seat of Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel.

The race is being run against a backdrop of vague discontent. Californians are upset over Viet Nam and crime, but few are willing to forecast how those issues will cut on Nov. 5. Paradoxes abound. The same voter will insist on increased Social Security benefits and balanced budgets. Labor seems to be splitting its presidential vote between Nixon and Wallace, largely ignoring Humphrey, and may well give a sizable share of its senatorial vote to Rafferty.

Fustian Rhetoric. Rafferty, 51, who upset Kuchel in the Republican primary in June, is a master of the politics of nostalgia. His rhetoric runs to the plush and fustian and is punctuated with such anachronistic expletives as "By Heaven!" and "Confound it!" and even "Horsefeathers!" He considers law and order "the one great issue" of the campaign, constantly deplores the decay of all that seems good and simple in the American past. His targets include novels, newspapers, experimental theater, student demonstrators, the Supreme Court, dope addicts, television commentators, urban rioters, and "the rotting away of our ancient standards of simple decency and morality."

In contrast to Rafferty's mordant oratorical style, Cranston's is flat and expressionless. He tends to sprinkle polysyllables over uncomprehending hearers, and, like Hubert Humphrey, he speaks for 20 minutes when the schedule calls for ten. Tall and lanky, Cranston broke track records at Stanford, and at 54 still exercises by occasionally jogging around the U.C.L.A. track. He helped found the archliberal California Democratic Council in 1953, then won the controller's job in the state's 1958 Democratic landslide. Cranston lost the senatorial nomination to Salinger in 1964 and the controllership itself in the 1966 near-sweep by Republicans that saw Ronald Reagan defeat Democrat Pat Brown to become Governor and Rafferty re-elected schools superintendent.

Close to Treason. The contest is perhaps the state's nastiest since Richard Nixon's epic battle against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950. Rafferty describes the United World Federalists and the American Veterans Committee, two organizations with which Cranston has worked closely, as "radical left-wing groups." Two weeks ago, he called Cranston's prescription for peace in Viet Nam, which includes a bombing halt in the North, "perilously close to a policy of treason." Shocked by their candidate's accusation, five prominent moderate Republicans last week urged the state G.O.P. central committee "to publicly censure Rafferty" for using "inflammatory, irresponsible and unworthy" language.

The Democrats have not exactly coddled Rafferty during the campaign. Cranston has refused to debate him, declaring: "He's a liar. How can you debate with a liar?" Democrats denounce Rafferty as a "racist" for calling the state's fair-housing law a "forced housing" act. With obvious relish, particularly in view of Rafferty's ringing condemnation of draft-card burners as "creeps, cowards, unwashed, long-haired Communists," the Democratic-leaning Long Beach Independent has accused the G.O.P candidate of being something less than avid to serve in the Armed Forces during World War II. Citing Rafferty's 4F status (for flat feet), the newspaper quoted his exwife: "He said if that didn't work, it would be easy to have an accident and shoot a toe off."

Swift Change. With his stringy legs, gaunt visage and balding, grey-fringed pate, Cranston looks like a latter-day Ichabod Crane, and his campaign style is reminiscent of Sleepy Hollow. Nonetheless, he holds a substantial lead over Rafferty in recent surveys, despite the fact that G.O.P. Presidential Candidate Richard Nixon appears to be far ahead of Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Recently, Mervin Field's California Poll gave him a lead of 47% to 35%, with 13% undecided and 3% in the "won't vote" category. There is likely to be an extraordinary amount of ticket splitting; Pollster Don Muchmore found that 28% of California's Republicans aim to cross over to Cranston, 16% of the Democrats to Rafferty.

One result of Rafferty's poor showing has been to bring Governor Reagan plunging in to his rescue. It is "absolutely imperative," said Reagan, "that Max Rafferty be the next United States Senator." Reagan deputized his two top aides to spur Rafferty's flagging campaign, and he has sent out an emergency appeal for financial help to his "kitchen cabinet" of rich California businessmen.

Rafferty himself did not seem worried. He came from behind in both his 1962 campaign and this year's primary race against Kuchel. Besides, he has little use for polls. "The pollsters in California are flagrant liars," he storms. "Their polls are phony, stupid and rigged." They are nothing of the sort, but Rafferty may not be entirely unjustified in ignoring their September samplings. In California, the nation's most populous state and growing more so at the rate of 1,200 people a day, it is a commonplace that everything can change in 24 hours.

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