Democratic Senate Casts Big Cloud Over Last 2 Reagan Years

The Democratic Party seized control of the Senate in dramatic fashion in Tuesday’s elections, achieving a 55-45 majority by capturing nine Senate seats held by Republicans and losing only one of their own.

The Democrats, who last controlled the Senate six years ago, reversed a 53-47 Republican majority despite an unprecedented campaign effort by President Reagan to stave off the Democratic challenge.

“If there was a Reagan revolution, it’s over,” claimed House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.), who is retiring from Congress. O’Neill’s House seat was won by Joseph P. Kennedy II, son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Dole Concedes

Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) conceded that “it’s going to make it more difficult for the President.”

With Democratic voters turning out in unexpectedly large numbers, Republican incumbents in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota and Washington all lost. In addition, Republican candidates seeking to retain seats vacated by retiring Republicans lost to Democrats in Maryland and Nevada.

Only in Missouri, where former Gov. Christopher S. Bond defeated Democratic Lt. Gov. Harriet Woods 53% to 47% in the race for the seat of retiring Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton, were the Republicans assured of winning a seat held by a Democrat.

Louisiana, Colorado

In California, another state where Republicans had hoped to gain a seat, Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston defeated Rep. Ed Zschau. Democrats held on in Louisiana and won in Colorado, both states where Democratic incumbents chose not to run again.

Against the decidedly Democratic trend in the Senate, Republicans held their losses to a minimum in the House. Democrats held a 253-182 advantage before the election and were expected to gain six more seats by the time final returns were tabulated.

And in the governors’ races, Republicans gained eight seats, barely short of the 10 they needed to command a majority for the first time since 1970. They scored particularly striking victories in the South, wresting control of governorships in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Texas.

But by taking control of the Senate, Democrats cast a cloud over President Reagan’s last two years in office. Although Democratic leaders immediately pledged to work with the popular President, their new-found control of the Senate, coupled with their continuing dominance of the House, will make it more difficult for the President to work his will in Congress.

“We want to cooperate,” said Senate Minority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.). But he warned that if Reagan failed to work with congressional Democrats to write trade and farm legislation, “we’re going ahead and putting a bill on his desk anyway.”

As returns and late projections trickled in at Republican National Committee headquarters, Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. tried to put the best face on what was turning into a severe setback in the Senate.

“We did well in the House, we did very well in the governorships, we did well in the state legislatures,” he said. “If we don’t keep the Senate, we’re three for four and that isn’t bad.”

Stinging Defeat

The Democratic victory was a stinging personal defeat for Reagan, who had put his prestige and popularity on the line by campaigning exhaustively for Republican Senate candidates. Traveling 25,000 miles in three weeks, he appealed to voters to cast a final ballot for him by electing candidates that would retain a Republican majority in the Senate.

At the urging of his close friend, Sen. Paul Laxalt, general chairman of the Republican National Committee and chairman of his two winning presidential campaigns, Reagan even made a final election eve visit to Nevada to try to save for the Republicans the Senate seat that Laxalt is vacating. But the effort went for naught as former Rep. Jim Santini lost to Democratic Rep. Harry Reid 51% to 45%.

Fowler Wins

Liberal Rep. Wyche Fowler Jr. of Atlanta, an opponent of Reagan’s policies of financial support for the contras in Nicaragua, scored one of the more surprising Democratic victories. He upset Sen. Mack Mattingly 51% to 49%. Mattingly had held significant leads in polls throughout most of the campaign but called on Reagan for a final campaign boost in the last week before the election as polls showed Fowler closing the gap.

Other GOP-held seats captured by Democrats were:

--Florida. Gov. Bob Graham soundly defeated Sen. Paula Hawkins 55% to 45%.

--North Carolina. Former Gov. Terry Sanford, also a former president of Duke University, defeated Sen. James T. Broyhill, who was appointed to the seat earlier this year after the suicide of incumbent Republican John East. The margin was 52% to 48%.

--Maryland. Rep. Barbara A. Mikulski handily defeated Linda Chavez, 61% to 39%, for the seat of retiring Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr.

--North Dakota. Democrat Kent Conrad, the state tax commissioner, held a narrow lead of 51% to 49% over Sen. Mark Andrews with 96% of the vote counted, and CBS and NBC projected that Conrad would hold his lead when all the votes were counted.

--South Dakota. Rep. Thomas A. Daschle won 51%-49% over Sen. James Abdnor.

--Alabama. Democratic Rep. Richard C. Shelby narrowly upset Sen. Jeremiah Denton. With 99% of the votes counted, Shelby led 603,525 to 591,841.

--Washington. Former Rep. Brock Adams, who was former President Jimmy Carter’s transportation secretary, defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Slade Gorton 51% to 49%.

Forced to Defend 22

In the 1980 elections, when the Republicans won back control of the Senate for the first time since 1954, the GOP held on to all 10 of its seats that were at stake while Democrats lost 12 of their 24. Those were the same seats up for election this year, and Republicans were forced to defend 22 of the 34 seats at stake.

Republican strategists, realizing they were in danger of losing several of the GOP-controlled seats, had counted heavily on winning several seats held by Democrats, including Cranston’s and the seats being vacated by Sen. Russell B. Long in Louisiana and Sen. Gary Hart in Colorado.

But Democratic Rep. John B. Breaux won handily over Republican Rep. W. Henson Moore in Louisiana, 53% to 47%. Democrat Timothy E. Wirth defeated Republican Kenneth B. Kramer in Colorado 51% to 49%.

Republican incumbents who were reelected were Frank Murkowski of Alaska, John McCain of Arizona, Steven Symms of Idaho, Dan Quayle of Indiana, Bob Dole of Kansas, Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire, Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, Bob Packwood of Oregon, Jake Garn of Utah, Bob Kasten of Wisconsin and Don Nickles of Oklahoma.

Among Democrats, other reelected incumbents included Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, Alan Dixon of Illinois, Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, John Glenn of Ohio, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Wendell Ford of Kentucky.

Not Swayed by Reagan

Exit polls indicated that although voters still supported President Reagan, they were not swayed by his entreaties to vote for Republican candidates as a way of casting a final vote for him. Florida voters, for example, gave Reagan a 64% approval rating, according to CBS exit polls, but Hawkins’ final vote was expected to be at least 20 percentage points less than that.

Exit polls generally showed Democrats turned out to vote in much larger numbers than Republicans and generally voted for their party’s candidates, a key factor in the outcome of the Senate elections.

In Florida, Gov. Graham ran strong among liberals and moderates against Sen. Hawkins. He carried the men’s vote by roughly 12 percentage points and the women’s vote by 10 percentage points, according to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

When women were not on the ballot, however, exit polls showed that women voters generally supported Democratic candidates by a greater percentage than men voters did.

Negative Campaign

In a bruising election year campaign marked by a heavy dose of negative campaign advertising, Linda Chavez ran an especially negative campaign in her losing effort against Rep. Mikulski in Maryland.

Chavez, a one-time U.S. Civil Rights Commission official who also served as Reagan’s liaison with community groups, described the Maryland congresswoman as “a San Francisco Democrat,” emphasized that she was single, accused her of being “anti-male” and challenged her to “come out of the closet” and debate.

Democratic strategists said the overwhelming margin of Mikulski’s victory clearly indicated Chavez’s tactics had backfired.