Lone Star State Voting Could Determine Nominee : Democrats See Texas as the Prize Worth Fighting Over

Here in the shadow of the Alamo, Texas’ most beloved symbol and shrine, Democratic presidential candidates are engaged in hand-to-hand fighting that would make Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett proud.

The reason is simple: For the Democrats, Texas is the super prize on Super Tuesday, two days away, when a record 20 states and one territory will vote in primaries and caucuses.

Texas will send 198 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, more than any other Super Tuesday state. And who wins and loses the Lone Star state could well determine who ultimately wins the Democratic nomination in July.

Furious Pace

As a result, the four main Democratic candidates are campaigning furiously--and more and more bitterly--from the East Texas oil belt, home of both yellow roses and die-hard “yellow-dog Democrats,” to gritty corn-and-cattle towns on the Mexican border, to the dizzying urban sprawls of Houston and Dallas.

Moreover, they are filling most of the state’s 19 scattered media markets with millions of dollars in TV ads, including the Democratic campaign’s most bruising and personal attacks to date.

“It’s nasty as hell out there,” Bob Slagle, state Democratic Party chairman, said Saturday.

The latest salvo hit Friday night when Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt began running TV ads attacking rival Michael S. Dukakis for his aides’ role in leaking a videotape that helped force Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. out of the race last September. The aides involved, including then-campaign manager John Sasso, were later fired.

“First, the Dukakis campaign smeared Joe Biden. . . . Now the campaign is trying to smear Dick Gephardt,” the 10-second ad says.

‘People Get Desperate’

“When people get desperate, they do desperate things,” Dukakis responded stiffly in a press conference in Seattle before flying here Saturday. Dukakis’ own ads have slammed Gephardt for “flip-flops” and for accepting money from political action committees.

Although the ads are running in several states, the uncivil war between the Massachusetts governor and the Missouri congressman is hottest in Texas. That’s because campaign officials increasingly see Texas as the critical contest for the only two Democrats to have won primaries or caucuses so far.

If Dukakis wins Texas, as well as his expected bases in Florida and Massachusetts, he will have won the three largest Super Tuesday states--and the undisputed crown of front-runner.

“We obviously would be very happy,” said Paul Brountas, Dukakis’ national campaign chairman.

By the same reasoning, if Gephardt can beat Dukakis in Texas, and remains competitive for delegates elsewhere, the tough-talking congressman would be positioned to mount strong challenges in the Illinois primary and Michigan caucuses later this month.

Good, Bad News for Gore

Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. has spent heavily on TV advertising in Texas, and one of his ads here attacks Gephardt directly. He has won high-profile endorsements from a wide assortment of Democratic leaders in the state as well as from both Dallas newspapers, but polls suggest that he has not parlayed this into strong grass-roots support.

Jackson Has Smaller Base

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, expected to be a leader in many of Super Tuesday’s Southern states, has strength but a smaller base here: Only one in 10 Texas Democrats is black. But he is campaigning hard, particularly in the urban areas of Houston and Dallas and in the largely Latino areas of southern Texas.

“Dukakis can pretty well wrap it up if he wins Texas and Florida,” said party chairman Slagle, who supports Gore. “Gephardt and Gore can stagger north, the way Paul Simon staggered south. But I think it’d be effectively over.”

Statewide polls generally show Dukakis leading a tight pack, but with daily movement and a significant number of undecided voters. A three-day tracking poll published Saturday by the Houston Chronicle and Dallas Morning News, for example, showed Dukakis at 30%, Jackson at 17%, Gephardt at 15% and Gore at 11%. Some 20% were undecided.

Dukakis Seen Benefiting

“A four-way race has played into Dukakis’ hands beautifully,” pollster Richard Murray, a political scientist at the University of Houston, said in a telephone interview. “It’s been disastrous to Gore. And it hasn’t helped Gephardt.”

Certainly none of the campaigns sounds particularly confident as the Tuesday vote nears.

Dukakis aides, for example, insist they do not need to win the statewide popular vote, as long as they win a quarter of the 119 delegates at stake Tuesday in Texas’ 31 state Senate districts. (An additional 64 delegates will be chosen later through a three-tier system of caucuses that begins Tuesday night; rounding out the state delegation will be 15 elected officials, mostly congressmen.)

“We’re going after delegates,” said Jose Villarreal, Dukakis’ state political director. “That’s our game. That’s our strategy.”

Jackson is doing the same. Aides say that with four strong contenders in the race, an important factor may be whether Jackson, in districts where he is relatively weak, can attract the 15% of votes that represents the threshold for winning delegates while denying that threshold to his rivals.

“If one candidate hits a lucky streak--and that might be us,” Jackson strategist Steve Cobble said, “they’re going to get a lot of delegates they don’t really deserve.”

Gephardt, meanwhile, helped by 10 Texas congressmen, has campaigned on his call for tougher trade policies and an oil import fee, particularly in the Houston and Beaumont areas, where organized labor is strong and times are tough.

‘We’re Uncle Sucker’

“There’s a feeling we’re not Uncle Sam anymore, we’re Uncle Sucker,” said George Christian, an Austin political consultant and former press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson. Gephardt, he said, “plays to that sense of resentment.”

Gephardt campaign officials think their biggest problem in Texas has been insufficient time and money to get Gephardt’s trade message across to enough voters.

“I just wish we had about two more weeks to get our message out for Texas and all of Super Tuesday,” said Missy Mandel, Gephardt’s state campaign director in Texas.

Gephardt and Gore, furthermore, are fighting for the same moderate-to-conservative base, which is not big enough to help both of them.

“The trend in Texas is for Democratic primaries to be increasingly liberal,” consultant Christian said. Latinos, he said, “are growing in influence. And the conservatives, to a large extent, have left the party.”

Banking on Latino Vote

Dukakis hopes Latinos will be his secret weapon. He has campaigned heavily in South Texas and appears to draw considerable support from the state’s heavily Democratic Mexican-American voters.

On a six-city Texas swing on Thursday and Friday, for example, Dukakis gave speeches in both English and fluent Spanish to enthusiastic, flag-waving crowds in Corpus Christi, Harlingen and Laredo.

With mariachi bands at each stop, Dukakis put a strong local twist on his message of jobs and opportunity for the hundreds of thousands of Texans dependent on the area’s long-depressed border economy. Towns such as McAllen suffer more than 16% unemployment, triple the national rate.

“When Mexico hurts, we hurt,” Dukakis told about 250 people at an airport rally in Laredo. “When Mexico loses jobs, we lose jobs.”

‘Viva Dukakis’

Amid cheers of “Viva Dukakis,” he emphasized again and again how his Greek-born parents “could not have imagined” that their son would run for “La Casa Blanca”--The White House.

“He’s the son of immigrants,” said state campaign chairman John Sharp, a Texas railroad commissioner. “That really means something here.”

Jackson, meanwhile, financially unable to compete on the airwaves with his three rivals, has sought in speeches to portray his lack of paid advertising as a virtue.

“I’m not coming to Texas with commercials and money, saying I don’t know you, meet me through TV and trust me,” Jackson told a rally in Odessa on Friday. “I know you, and you know me.” The line brought the audience to its feet, shouting cries of affirmation.

Staff writers Douglas Jehl and James Risen contributed to this story.