The Senate: Landslide or No, The G.O.P. Margin Shrinks

By KURT ANDERSEN

Helms stays, Percy goes, and youthful newcomers march in

For downcast Democrats, the results of Senate races provided the one swath of cheerful news. The party did not regain the majority control it lost in 1980, but the power has shifted a solid bit its way. The net gain of two seats will reduce the G.O.P. majority to 53 to 47. Moreover, the ideological tilt will be even greater than the simple partisan tally indicates, since the two lost Republican seats are going, in effect, to liberal Democrats. Because of the shift, the Senate is more likely to slip back under Democratic sway in 1986, when almost twice as many Republicans as Democrats will be running for reelection. The results also showed the rise to power of a new generation. Three of the five freshman Democratic Senators--John Kerry of Massachusetts, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee--are Viet Nam veterans.

This was a good year to be an incumbent, and only three of the 29 Senators running for re-election were defeated. A few others had to fight. James Exon, 63, the Nebraska Democrat, won a tough race against Nancy Hoch, 48, an earnest, moderate Republican and one of nine women who challenged incumbents--all unsuccessfully. Contesting an open seat in Texas, Republican Phil Gramm, 42, badly beat Liberal Lloyd Doggett, 38.

Of the surviving incumbents, the most scrutinized was Jesse Helms. No major American political figure arouses stronger feelings than Helms, 63. Millions of Americans reject his ferocious New Right ideology, while millions of others share his many resentments--of Government, of feminism, blacks and modern life itself. At home in North Carolina, Helms' antagonists were in the minority: he was re-elected to his third Senate term against Moderate James B. Hunt Jr., 47, the state's outgoing Governor, with 53% of the vote.

The election concerned the Senate only nominally. Both sides cast the race as a stark moral referendum. Helms called his right-wing philosophy "the cause of a Christian nation." Hunt described the race as "a historic chance to say what kind of people we are" and spoke darkly of the "radical right wing" that a Helms triumph would encourage to "take over this country." As Hunt politicked Tuesday night at a Raleigh polling place, he had a final, frustrating, emblematic campaign encounter. A young woman declined to shake his hand. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I'm a Christian, and I'm voting for your opposition." As she walked away, Hunt cried out, "You don't think anyone else is a Christian?"

Helms outspent Hunt; their combined expenditures exceeded $22 million, more than has been spent on any other nonpresidential election. An average of 200 TV spots a day ran in the past month. One recent Helms ad showed his opponent at the National Governors' Conference earlier this year supporting a deficit-reduction resolution; a narrator described the scene as "actual news footage in slow motion of Jim Hunt voting to raise your taxes." The most memorable Democratic ad consisted of pictures of death-squad victims in El Salvador under a sound track of semiautomatic fire; Helms is a patron of Roberto d'Aubuisson, the Salvadoran who has been linked to death squads. That particular connection may prove significant: with the defeat of Senator Charles Percy, Helms could take over the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee.

The Reagan landslide clinched it for Helms. Hunt, for his part, failed to get out enough of the black vote. According to an exit poll, Helms won the support of 60% of white North Carolinians; since 87% of the voters hi the poll were white, he did not need a single black vote to win.

Senator Walter D. ("Dee") Huddleston, 58, is a mild-mannered, moderate Democrat hardly known outside Kentucky. He never aroused passions one way or the other. Nor did he ever really worry about his re-election to a third term over a G.O.P. county executive.

The little-known Addison Mitchell ("Mitch") McConnell, 42, is no more flamboyant or ideological than Huddleston, but he is a Republican eager beaver in a Republican year who spent almost as much money as the incumbent. He managed his extremely narrow upset by convincing Kentuckians that their Senator is a flaccid backbencher. Declared McConnell: "I can't think of a single thing that Huddleston has done for Kentucky. No one else can either." McConnell organized weekly derisive "Dope on Dee" seminars. He made much of the fact that Huddleston, the ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, missed almost a quarter of this year's 300 roll-call votes. McConnell harped on the Democrat's junketeering with a funny, effective TV ad that purported to show a pack of bloodhounds tracking down Huddleston around the country.

McConnell is a somewhat humorless, hardworking lawyer who served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Ford Administration. Serious even as a Louisville child--he is said to have carried a briefcase in the eighth grade--McConnell has a solid seven-year record managing Jefferson County. He had passed up other statewide offices that seemed more winnable. "He decided to do this 15 years ago," says a friend, Businessman Stephen Linker. "He planned and planned and beat the bushes and he raised money. He's very calculating."

Two sons of Harvard and of famous political families, both polished Democratic moderates, won election to open Southern seats. Tennessee's Albert Gore Jr., 36, whose father served three influential terms in the Senate, was an easy victor over a weak Republican candidate. West Virginia's John D. ("Jay") Rockefeller IV, 47, also faced a wobbly Republican opponent and had also been considered a shoo-in; yet TV network-news polls reported early Tuesday evening that Republican Businessman John R. Raese was winning. Rockefeller ended up winning by a margin of 4%. "I saw the Reagan coattails coming," declared Rockefeller, who lost his first gubernatorial election in the 1972 Nixon landslide.

But Rockefeller may have done himself some damage too. The surname means money, and he spent profligately on his campaign: more than $9 million, $7 million of it from his own funds. "Jay's spending was obscene," said Raese. A huge pro-Reagan turnout also cut into his margin. In all, Rockefeller is lucky that he faced Raese, 34, a political novice who made tactical blunders regularly.

Rockefeller's father-in-law, Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy, had a nip-and-tuck election night that did not end as well. Percy, who recently turned 65, was forcibly retired from the Senate after three terms. The onetime presidential prospect was upset by a thoughtful and tweedy downstate Congressman, Paul Simon, 55.

Like many aging Wunderkinder who never quite live up to early hopes for them, Percy seemed portentous more than profound. Although he enjoyed the limelight as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he was not much of a legislative craftsman. His fuzzy ideology finally left him without a political base. In the past, Percy had been attacked mainly from the right; this time, facing a strong liberal, he pitched himself as a Reaganite. Not only did he lose the votes of once sympathetic blacks and liberals, but New Right groups worked against his re-election out of spite for past heresies.

Simon, an author and former editor of the Troy (Ill.) Tribune, has represented a tough, grungy rural district for a decade. A prolabor liberal, he put together the late, great Democratic coalition: he captured Chicago's blacks, ethnics and liberal whites overwhelmingly, and a majority of the rural quasi-Southerners downstate. He may have been helped by an uptick in the state unemployment rate (to 9.4%) announced last week.

The Republicans lost another incumbent just across the Mississippi River in Iowa. Like Percy, Roger Jepsen, 55, may have been hurt by rural economic problems; the farm-debt crisis is severe. But Jepsen, a conservative first-termer, had plenty of problems of his own doing. Last year he claimed congressional immunity to beat a Washington traffic ticket, and in June the born-again Christian was forced to confess that he had applied for membership in a Des Moines spa-cum-brothel in 1978. Nor was Jepsen always solid on matters of substance. In 1981, he trumpeted his opposition to the Administration's sale of AWACS radar planes to the Saudis, then voted for the sale. He had vowed he would not vote to raise the federal debt ceiling, but then did so anyway.

For his part, Harkin, 44, was merely obliged to make explanations, if not apologies, for being a liberal. A five-term Congressman from a rural district, Harkin was aptly described by Jepsen as a "slick-talking lawyer." Harkin is also something of a populist. The race, though, really pivoted on the issue of Jepsen's character. Harkin seemed sturdier. The Democrat's slogan: "Tom Harkin: A Senator Iowans Can Be Proud Of."

In Massachusetts, the winner was a former antiwar activist whose 55% to 45% victory is sure to restore some of the commonwealth's old reputation as a leftist bastion. The image is not altogether accurate, but John Kerry, 40, will be one of a trio of liberal Senate freshmen. An attractive Yale graduate decorated for naval heroics in Viet Nam before he turned against the war, the Irish-American Kerry is conspicuously Kennedyesque.

His opponent, Republican Raymond Shamie, 63, was considered a hopeless right-wing political adventurer when he ran against senior Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1982. But Shamie's surprising landslide victory against former Attorney General Elliot Richardson in the primary two months ago had excited the state's Republicans. They suddenly saw a chance that the manufacturing millionaire's Archie Bunker affability might actually win him the seat of retiring Democratic Senator Paul Tsongas, even though Shamie has never held public office. But Shamie responded ineptly when it was revealed that he had flitted around the John Birch Society in the early '70s.

Lieutenant Governor Kerry kept his cool, making literary allusions and articulately advocating a standard agenda: for a nuclear freeze and controls on pollutants that cause acid rain, against expanded U.S. military involvement in Central America. But his election may not presage any liberal renaissance. "What happened is that this race became a referendum on Ray Shamie's ideas and past associations," says Kerry Pollster Tom Kiley. "Shamie lost largely for these reasons." --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Christopher Ogden/Chicago andB.J. Phillips/ Raleigh, with other bureaus

With reporting by Christopher Ogden, B.J. Phillips