Jordan Loses Georgia Race; Bond in Runoff

Five-term Rep. Wyche Fowler Jr. won Georgia’s Democratic senatorial nomination, avoiding a runoff with former Carter White House aide Hamilton Jordan by the slimmest of margins, results showed today.

State Sen. Julian Bond was forced into a runoff with another civil rights veteran, former Atlanta City Councilman John Lewis, in the battle for the Democratic nomination for Fowler’s seat in Congress.

Martin Luther King III, son of the slain civil-rights leader, won the Democratic nomination for a seat on the Fulton County Commission, but Ralph David Abernathy III, the son of the late King’s right-hand man, lost a bid to unseat a Democratic incumbent state lawmaker.

In Colorado, meanwhile, state Sen. Ted Strickland beat millionaire businessman Steve Schuck in a seesaw battle for the GOP nomination for governor. Strickland will face Democratic state Treasurer Roy Romer in November for a chance to succeed three-term Democratic Gov. Richard D. Lamm.

Fowler, an Atlanta-area congressman since 1977, avoided a runoff by less than half a percentage point, collecting 50.3% of the vote. He needed a majority to avoid a runoff Sept. 2 against Jordan, the runner-up in the race to challenge Sen. Mack Mattingly, the first Republican elected senator in Georgia in this century.

Computer Problems

With 99% of precincts reporting, Fowler led with 310,704 votes; Jordan had 192,329 votes or 31%; state Rep. John Russell, a nephew of the late Sen. Richard B. Russell, had 100,519 votes or 16%, and Gerald Belsky, a follower of political extremist Lyndon LaRouche, had 14,204 votes or 2%.

Most of the missing votes were from Marion and Monroe counties in middle Georgia, both of which had problems with election computers.

With 99% of precincts reporting, Bond had 31,063 votes or 47%, Lewis had 22,753 votes or 35%, and five others divided the rest.

Bond, a state legislator for 20 years, and Lewis, a former Atlanta city councilman, both were active and highly visible during the civil rights marches and campaigns of the 1960s.

Fowler spent much of his campaign among drought-plagued farmers in south Georgia, saying at one point, “I’ve tried to be a city boy who knows about farm issues.”

Jordan designed the strategy that helped Jimmy Carter win the presidency in 1976 but had no easily recognized political identity of his own. His entry into the race followed a well-publicized bout with lymphoma, a form of cancer of which his doctors pronounced him cured.

Jordan’s television ads portrayed him as a family man in an attempt to distance him from the playboy image of his Washington days, when he was accused of spitting liquor on a patron at a bar, insulting the Egyptian ambassador’s wife and using cocaine at a New York disco. A special investigator dismissed the cocaine allegation as groundless.