Down to the Wire, and Still a Horse Race

The climax to one of the Republican Party's most intriguing and bitterly contested presidential nomination fights was only two weeks away and yet the outcome was still in doubt. In their more candid moments, campaign aides to President Gerald Ford and Challenger Ronald Reagan agreed to a surprising degree on how the battle shaped up. "I don't think there's any lockup available in this campaign," observed Ford's chairman, Rogers Morton. Said the President's chief delegate hunter, James Baker: "We're a hundred votes ahead of them, and we're still confident of victory, but there hasn't been any spectacular development to resolve the thing once and for all." Admitted a Reagan aide: "The situation is very fluid. But if nothing happens, the President will win the nomination."

All week long Reagan and his bombshell choice for Vice President, Pennsylvania's liberal Senator Richard Schweiker, worked valiantly to make "something happen." Convinced that Ford had been moving toward a narrow, but near certain first-ballot victory, Reagan and Campaign Manager John Sears (see box) had resorted to a desperate gamble. The Schweiker selection, they had hoped, would throw the race into confusion, check the Ford buildup, and give Reagan a chance to break through in the only area where enough wavering Ford supporters and uncommitted delegates seemed ripe for plucking: the large Northeast delegations of New York (154 votes), New Jersey (67) and Schweiker's home, Pennsylvania (103). The gamble will keep the Reagan candidacy more or less alive, but it signally failed to produce that needed breakthrough.

Before any sallies into the Northeast could be helpful, Reagan had to nail down his own strength in the South. In a visit to Jackson, Miss., he and Schweiker reassured 13 restless Alabama delegates, who stayed with the ticket. But the two were much less successful in trying to convince the vital Mississippi delegation that Schweiker had shed his liberal horns and that no basic ideological split remained between the two running mates.

The double-edged drive was difficult for Reagan and his putative running mate. Having told Southerners that Schweiker was not nearly as liberal as his voting record suggests, they argued in the North that Reagan's very selection of Schweiker showed that the Californian was not as doctrinaire and rigid a conservative as he has been portrayed. With this rationalization, Reagan managed to open a few more small cracks in Ford's strongest bastions. But he was still far short of cracking those bastions wide enough to give him more than a long-shot chance in Kansas City:

NEW YORK. Strongly influenced by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, the state had been expected to deliver all but a score or so of its votes to Ford. After the Reagan-Schweiker visit, Reagan gained only two new votes, neither attributable to his selection of Schweiker. TIME'S count showed 127 Ford votes in the delegation, 20 for Reagan and seven uncommitted.

NEW JERSEY. Until last week not a single New Jersey delegate had been bold enough to buck the party's state leaders and announce for Reagan, although at least a few had been leaning his way. Last week four came out of the closet, including Joseph Yglesias, a Hudson County house painter, who was more irked at Ford's lack of concern over job cutbacks in the county's Military Ocean Terminal than enchanted by the Schweiker candidacy. Others said they had based their commitments on the belief that Reagan would run better against Carter than would Ford. (Some polls now show Reagan and Ford doing about equally well against Carter --but both dismally behind.) New Jersey now breaks down: Ford 59, Reagan four, uncommitted four.

PENNSYLVANIA. Following up on his own telephoned pleas to most of his home state's delegates, Schweiker joined Reagan in both private and group meetings with about 80 members of the heavily pro-Ford delegation. After a soft-sell afternoon, they claimed that they had made some conversions, but failed to name any. The unspecified gains were in addition to ten claimed earlier in the week by Reagan Strategist Sears. But of those ten, TIME had earlier counted five as likely Reagan votes. The delegation wound up at 80 for Ford, 13 for Reagan and ten uncommitted.

Despite all of the week's claims and counterclaims, TIME'S delegate count at week's end included enough scattered shifts to leave the two candidates' totals precisely where they were the week before. Ford had 1,126 delegates, just four short of the 1,130 needed for the nomination, Reagan 1,048, while 85 were uncommitted.

Unless the Reagan camp can turn up many more converts to his cause, Schweiker will continue to look like more of a liability than an asset. While agreeing to stand behind Reagan, delegates from the South and West raised the possibility of resisting any Schweiker nomination at the convention. North Carolina Delegate Larry W. Godwin, Reagan's chairman in Harnett County, sent out some 900 letters to delegates arguing that "we can do better than Schweiker" and urging them not to commit themselves to the Pennsylvanian. Some Reagan aides even passed the quiet word in North Carolina that he might yet change his mind about Schweiker. Conservative Columnist William Buckley supported the idea, blandly suggesting to the convention that it could always reject Schweiker and hinting that Reagan would not strenuously object. Such a switch would make Reagan look either profoundly opportunistic or as bad a bumbler on the vice-presidential decision as Democrat George McGovern in 1972.

Wisely Waited. One part of the Reagan strategy clearly did not work. By announcing his running mate in advance, he had hoped to pressure Ford into doing the same. While some delegates grumbled that they wanted all of Ford's cards on the table too, the President toyed with the idea only briefly, then decided--wisely--to await his own possible nomination before revealing his choice. Any advance announcement obviously would have needlessly irked some delegates.

Already the prominent mention of Texan John Connally as being high on Ford's list was raising the objections of some moderate and liberal Republicans, who warned that the former Texas Governor would be a liability because of his close connection with former President Richard Nixon and lingering doubts about his role in the Nixon milk scandal.

Certainly, Reagan's gamble with Schweiker had achieved a secondary purpose of confusing matters and raising the choice of a Vice President as an emotional issue in the minds of delegates. But his urgent need was to press on in hard pursuit of delegates who are becoming more elusive as they weary of all the conflicting pressures. As one pro-Reagan delegate, Delaware's William Swain Lee, explained his fed-up feelings, "After what I've been through, I'd stay with Reagan even if the heavens opened up and a voice from the sky told me I was wrong." Plainly, many of the Ford delegates were digging in too as the Kansas City showdown neared.

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