Off-Year Races: No Referendum

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

In two state elections, Washington is hardly an issue

In America, land of the permanent campaign, every congressional vote, every opinion poll, certainly every off-year election somehow becomes a referendum on the President and his programs. So Ronald Reagan campaigned dutifully last month for Republican gubernatorial Candidates Marshall Coleman in Virginia and Thomas Kean in New Jersey. Both party hopefuls returned the embrace. As Kean said during the campaign: "We have got to do in New Jersey what President Reagan has been doing in Washington." But there was scant evidence that voters in either state saw their contests as a sort of large-scale Gallup sampling. The races were just as plausibly a referendum on departing New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne, who angered taxpayers by allowing a new 21,000-seat state sports facility to be named the Brendan Byrne Arena, or on the popularity in Virginia of the Moral Majority's the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who, to the G.O.P.'s consternation, endorsed the party ticket weeks after a poll showed he was perhaps the most unpopular public figure in the state.

Contradictory results in the two races suggest that if they were meant as a down-home test of Reagan's popularity, the nation is a house divided. As soon as the quirky results were in, a thudding defeat for Coleman by Democrat Charles Robb in normally Republican Virginia, and an apparent narrow victory for Kean over Democrat James Florio in normally Democratic New Jersey, White House Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speakes proclaimed the elections were emphatically not "a referendum on the President himself or the President's economic policies."

In Virginia's bitter campaign, Reagan was scarcely an issue. Winner Robb, a conservative by principle and a pragmatist by practice, simply refused to attack him. Said Robb: "It's clear that President Reagan is very popular." At least as much an issue was another President, almost 13 years out of office. The late Lyndon B. Johnson, father of the Great Society, was also the father of Robb's wife Lynda Bird. Her mother, Lady Bird, gave $25,410 to the campaign. Robb nonetheless remained studiously distant from Johnson too. A popular but powerless Lieutenant Governor since his debut in politics four years ago, Robb relied on winks, nudges and noncommittal words to suggest empathy with each of the ill-fitting elements of his coalition: suburban moderates and independents, coal miners and union members, many rural conservatives and blacks. On issues he was all but indistinguishable from Cole man. Their chief dispute was about which of them more clearly deserved to be called conservative.

Robb's victory had been forecast in polls through most of the race. But it rattled Republicans in their strongest state in the South (nine of ten House seats, the past three Governors). As Robb had predicted, his margin, unofficially 769,422 to 662,788, came mostly from blacks. Four years ago, as much as a third of the state's black voters supported Coleman as a moderate Attorney General. But he alienated many this year when he opposed a bill to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a state holiday. More telling, late in the campaign former Republican Governor Mills Godwin denounced several voting reforms designed to strengthen black representation nationwide, while Robb, with characteristic caution, supported the measures, but urged black leaders not to publicize some of his views. Word nonetheless got around.

In Norfolk and Portsmouth, some black precincts went for Robb by as much as 35 to 1. Fretted Republican National Committee Chairman Richard Richards: "They [blacks] are distrustful of us, and they shouldn't be. If we don't do better, we are going to lose time after time."

New Jersey's election has already produced about a dozen preliminary vote totals, alternately showing Kean or Florio ahead by margins ranging from 25 to 2,060, out of some 2.3 million votes cast. A declaration of a winner is due this week, but each side, if it loses, has vowed to seek a recount (at an approximate statewide cost to the challenger of a $140,000 deposit).*

The closeness of the race spotlighted one dubious tactic of the Republican National Committee and its New Jersey affiliate. On Election Day, thousands of signs proclaiming the presence of the official-sounding "National Ballot Security Task Force" were posted by Republican operatives. Some wore armbands. According to Kean aides, some were off-duty police officers carrying weapons. Democrats charged the task force was an attempt to frighten overwhelmingly Democratic inner-city voters. By early afternoon that day, State Superior Court Judge Daniel A. O'Donnell had ruled the signs illegal and the effort disbanded.

But not, Florio claimed, before the tactic had a chilling effect.

The campaign seemed less a plebiscite on issues than a choice between classic partisan stereotypes: Florio, the dark, tough-talking grandson of an Italian immigrant, a sworn friend of unions and critic of Big Business, driven by ambition; Kean, the prep-accented millionaire scion of a family that had produced Governors stretching back to colonial days, a fiscal conservative and a moderate on social issues, bowing to a family tradition of public service. Yet both had enemies within their natural constituencies:

Florio among liberals, because he was supported by right-to-lifers and the National Rifle Association; Kean among conservatives, because as a legislator he sponsored environmental regulations, rent control and an attempted ban on cheap handguns.

The race upset so many norms that it tricked one of network television's savviest pollsters, Warren Mitofsky of CBS, into projecting Florio the winner by about an eight-point margin as soon as the polls closed. ABC had jumped the gun two hours before on its New York City station's local news, saying the "trend" was to Florio. The NBC station waited till 11:13 p.m. to project a Kean victory. Then it, like the other networks, backed off. All three networks said they would spend the next few days figuring out what went wrong. For the eventual loser in the New Jersey race, who would have needed to sway roughly one more voter in every 2,000 to win, the question of what went wrong will linger a long, long time.

--By William A. Henry III. Reported by Anne Constable/Richmond and Peter Stoler/Trenton

* If the challenger does not overturn the result, the cost of the recount is forfeited from the deposit, except for the cost in each district where there has been an error of 10% or ten votes, whichever is greater.

With reporting by Anne Constable, Peter Stoler

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