Money, Mud and Even Baseball

By William R. Doerner. Reported by Neil MacNeil/Washington and Christopher Ogden/Chicago, with other bureaus

The campaigns for Congress and statehouses are heating up

Presidential contests naturally overshadow the rest of a national election, but the top of the ticket does not necessarily control the fate of those farther down. The party of a re-elected presidential incumbent may profit richly from his hold on the electorate, as the Democrats did in 1964 under Lyndon B. Johnson. Or it can actually lose ground in Congress, as the Republicans did in 1956 under Dwight D. Eisenhower. In either case, races for Congress and Statehouses turn to a large extent on local issues and personalities, with plenty of help from money and mud. Last week, with all but the final round of primaries out of the way, candidates across the nation were heaving away furiously at the splatterboard of state and regional politics, creating patterns of flecks and daubs that will become the 1984 election scorecard on Nov. 6.

At stake is a sizable portion of the U.S. machine of government: 33 Senate seats, all 435 House seats and 13 governorships, as well as thousands of local jobs. The Democrats, starting out with a 99-vote majority in the House and 35 of the 50 gubernatorial prizes, are hoping to regain control of the Senate, which they lost in 1980 for the first time in 28 years. The G.O.P. now has an edge of ten seats. The Republicans are counting on good economic times and Ronald Reagan's popularity to translate into major gains for their candidates. Their goals include not only holding on to the Senate but also winning enough seats in the House to give them a working majority in cooperation with conservative Democrats, a setup they enjoyed during the President's first two years in office.

The G.O.P.'s strategy raises the issue of whether Reagan's likability can indeed persuade large numbers of independent and Democratic voters to vote for other Republicans. Reagan, after all, has been nicknamed the Teflon President by his Democratic detractors, who are frustrated by his ability to separate himself from his Administration's failures. Perhaps wishfully, they maintain that Teflon Presidents do not come equipped with Velcro coattails. "Our polls reflect that Reagan's personal popularity is not transferable to Senate Republican candidates," says J. Brian Atwood, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "They have had to support Reagan's policies, which are nowhere near as popular as the man."

Republicans, however, seem sure that the President's high standing in the polls will prove a boon for other Republican candidates. Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, calls Reagan's margin in the polls "the best single indicator in any state" of overall G.O.P. electoral chances. Reagan is taking every opportunity to tie his candidacy to those of other G.O.P. office seekers. Says a key House Republican campaign aide: "Should Ronald Reagan win in a landslide, but we fail to add to our numbers in the House, the Reagan revolution is over."

The Republicans are probably most vulnerable in the Senate, if only because they are defending 19 seats, five more than the Democrats. The Democrats need a net gain of six seats to form a majority, assuming that the tie-breaking vice-presidential ballot remains in G.O.P. hands. Few analysts think the Democrats are likely to win that many, though half a dozen Republican seats are considered at risk. Among them is the one now held by North Carolina's Ultraconservative Jesse Helms, who is being challenged by Governor James Hunt in a contest that is unrivaled for expenditures of cash and invective (see following story).

The rhetoric is only marginally more elevated in Texas, where Republican Phil Gramm and Democrat Lloyd Doggett are vying for the Senate seat held by the retiring Republican, John Tower. Gramm, one of the defecting Democratic "boll weevils" who supported Reagan's 1981 budget-cutting bill, switched parties in 1983. He f gleefully watched three Democrats battle through much of the year for the right to oppose him. Then he embarrassed liberal State Senator Doggett by revealing that $354 of his campaign funds had been raised by a homosexual-rights group at an all-male strip show. Doggett enjoys the advantage of Texans' ingrained inclination to press the Democratic lever in state contests. Still, political observers call the race a squeaker.

By contrast, the Republicans appear to have all but conceded the seat of another _ retiree, Majority Leader 3 Howard Baker of Tennessee. It is being sought by Democrat Albert Gore Jr., son of the former Senator and an articulate neoliberal who has spent four terms in the House. Gore used his committee posts in Washington to hold high-profile hearings on pollution in Tennessee's Oak Ridge nuclear facility and on the toxic-waste cleanup Superfund of the EPA. The Republicans dawdled in finding a candidate, finally nominating Victor Ashe, a 15-year state legislator with a cantankerous political disposition.

In Illinois, three-term Charles Percy is encountering stiff Democratic opposition, this time from Congressman Paul Simon. Percy has lost some of his usual appeal to moderate crossover voters and downstate Republicans because Simon has a relatively liberal voting record and hails from downstate Carbondale. Moreover, Simon is an imaginative campaigner. Last week he showed up at Wrigley Field with 500 supporters for a Chicago Cubs game, shouting himself hoarse as the National League Eastern Division leaders whipped the Montreal Expos. Percy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has been forced to seek support from the Republican right, which traditionally has shunned him. Simon is running close to Percy in the polls, and the race could easily turn on the direction of the presidential vote.

Voters in Iowa have established a tradition of tossing out incumbent Senators, having disposed of two of them in that fashion over the past six years. They may be set to reinforce the pattern. The victim would be conservative Republican Roger Jepsen, who is being challenged by five-term liberal Congressman Tom Harkin. Jepsen, regarded by many as pompous, was badly hurt by the revelation that seven years ago he had visited a Des Moines sex club. Harkin has lately been running ahead of Jepsen in the polls, but observers warn that it is still too early to count the Republican out. For one thing, the influential Des Moines Register, which has hardly been a Jepsen sympathizer in the past, urged voters to disregard the sex-club peccadillo and focus on the issues.

Not even the most optimistic Republican foresees a G.O.P. majority in the House of Representatives, which the Democrats currently dominate by 266 to 167, with two seats vacant. Indeed, the number of new Republican seats that the optimists deem possible, around 20, would not even make up the 26-member loss that the party suffered in the 1982 mid-term election. Political Analyst Kevin Phillips says that most Republicans realistically expect to pick up only about six additional House seats.

One of the congressional races most eagerly targeted by the Republicans is the reelection bid of Oklahoma Democrat James Jones, chairman of the House Budget Committee. Jones has incurred the Reaganauts' wrath by forcing them to compromise on Administration spending measures on the grounds that the budget deficit was growing too fast. Though his reputation nationally is that of a moderate conservative, the Republicans have portrayed him in Oklahoma as a free-spending liberal. Both Jones and his opponent, Frank Keating, a former FBI agent and U.S. attorney, are financing expensive campaigns with a blizzard of cash donated by party election funds and political action committees. Since he won with only 54% of the vote in 1982, Jones will be forced to hustle hard. Says Jones of his opponents: "They have got my attention."

In the South, two House races have highlighted the deepening rift between newly powerful black voters and the liberal Establishment of the Democratic Par ty. One is a rerun of a 1982 race between incumbent Republican Webb Franklin and Democrat Robert Clark, a State representative seeking to become Mississippi's first black Congressman since 1883. Many blacks complained bitterly two years ago that white Democrats failed to support Clark on racial grounds, and they seriously considered running an independent black in the state's all-white Senate race this year in retaliation. New boundaries have raised the proportion of the district's eligible black voters to 58%, and black leaders have worked hard to register new voters.

Another district with a new black majority has presented Democrat Lindy Boggs with the toughest challenger of her eleven years in the House. He is former State Appeals Court Judge Israel Augustine, a black moderate who has fared well with white voters in past races. He will face Boggs in a primary next week. (There is no G.O.P. House candidate in the district.) Boggs, a liberal with an exemplary voting record on civil rights issues, argues that she deserves the continued support of her black constituents. Says Baton Rouge Political Consultant James Carville: "What this will tell us is whether or not it's time to get out of the way if you're a white liberal."

What Republican George Hansen's

Idaho race may prove is that convicted felons do not do well at the ballot box. Hansen is appealing a five-to-15-month prison sentence and a fine of $40,000 for failing to include substantial sums of his wife's loans and profits in his House financial disclosure forms. Hansen was formally reprimanded by the House in July, and his conviction has become the No. 1 issue in the election race. Says his Democratic rival, Ricks College History Department Chairman Richard Stallings: "I was taught that when I sign my name to something, it ought to be right."

Of the six Governors seeking reelection, the one in biggest trouble does not even find out who his challenger will be until this week, when Washington State holds its primary. Republican Governor John Spellman, seeking a second term, is a victim of the Washington Public Power Supply System fiasco, popularly called Whoops, which led to the largest default in municipal bond market history. Though many of the misjudgments that caused the default occurred years before Spellman took office, Democrats blame him for failing to exercise sufficient leadership when the regional power authority's problems came to a crisis in 1983.

In Utah, it is the Republicans who are hoping to take a governorship away from the Democrats. With popular Democratic Governor Scott Matheson stepping down after two terms, the established f front runner in the race to succeed him is Norman Bangerter, speaker of the Utah house, who is campaigning on a promise to make state "government more efficient. A poll two weeks ago by the Deseret News showed him leading his Democratic opponent, former Congressman Wayne Owens, 51% to 39%, with the remainder undecided. Owens is seeking to close the gap by making a five-week walk across the state.

Although it is the fiercely contested races that are capturing most of the attention at local levels, really close contests are the exception this year. "It's a pro-incumbent year," says one Democratic congressional insider. "Things are going well--why change?" If that is indeed the sentiment among voters, then the 99th Congress and the 1985-86 statehouse lineups could end up looking very much like those now in place. But even pro-incumbent years are bound to produce some surprises. What they should not be allowed to produce, however, is any widespread decline in voter attention. --By William R. Doerner.

Reported by Neil MacNeil/Washington and Christopher Ogden/Chicago, with other bureaus

With reporting by Neil MacNeil/Washington and Christopher Ogden/Chicago