Bush Posts 16-State Landslide; Key Victories Bolster Dukakis : Gore, Jackson Big Winners in Deep South

Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis captured Florida and Texas, the two biggest stars in the Super Tuesday constellation, bolstering his claim to national appeal, while Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. ran a surprisingly strong race to emerge as his principal competitor in the Democratic presidential contest.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, boosted by black support in the Deep South, finished slightly ahead of Gore in the delegate count. Ending up fourth was Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, victor in last month’s Iowa caucuses who until Tuesday’s dismal performance had been regarded as Dukakis’ chief challenger.

The other two Democratic presidential candidates were barely visible in the final results. Illinois Sen. Paul Simon did not compete actively in the South after failing to win any of the earlier primaries or caucuses. And former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, after finishing no better than next to last in previous contests, was not viewed as a serious contender on Super Tuesday and got no more than 5% of the vote anywhere.

All told, the Democratic presidential candidates competed in 20 states, 14 of them Southern or Border states.

Of the 16 contests decided by late Tuesday night, Dukakis won six. In addition to delegate-rich Florida and Texas, he also finished first in primaries in Maryland, Rhode Island and in his home state and won the caucuses in Idaho.

Besides his home state of Tennessee, Gore won Kentucky, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Arkansas. Jackson won Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Virginia and the two men were locked in a close struggle for Alabama.

Gephardt won only his home state.

In the critical contest for delegates, with 2,082 needed for a majority, Dukakis had 436, Jackson 382, Gore 338 and Gephardt 144, according to the Associated Press.

The numbers told only part of the story. By his performance Tuesday in the Southern contests, Dukakis had demonstrated an ability to win Democratic votes outside his home region in the Northeast.

By contrast, Gore’s success Tuesday was entirely in his native Dixie. He had previously won only one other delegate contest, the Wyoming caucuses last Saturday, and had campaigned in Nevada’s Tuesday caucuses, where he led in early returns. For him to sustain his candidacy and close in on front-runner Dukakis, he urgently needs to prove his appeal to non-Southern voters.

Gore’s first chance to do that will come next Tuesday in Illinois, a state in which he appeared to rank far behind Dukakis in financial and organizational resources.

As for Jackson, he had been expected to do well in the Southern Democratic contests. His performance Tuesday did not significantly alter the impression that he does not have a serious chance for the nomination, largely because of his ultra-liberal views and racial prejudice among some whites.

But his performance came close to meeting the high expectations he had set for himself in the South. He took about 10% of the white vote in the region, roughly double his performance in similar contests in 1984.

“Something phenomenal is happening in our nation,” he declared.

Dukakis’ successes Tuesday had been generally forecast, though his margin in Florida was even greater than had been expected. He reacted to the vote tallies and to the challenges still awaiting him with characteristic caution.

“No, I’m not the nominee,” he said. “This is going to be a long one and we’re going to have to take it step by step.”

‘A Great Night’

Still, Dukakis contended, “this has been a great night for us, to be able to take Texas and Florida, the two big ones, as well as a number of other states, and to do fairly well consistently across the board, demonstrates that this is a national candidacy, a national campaign.”

In Illinois, where next Tuesday’s primary will mark the first contest in a big Midwestern industrial state, Charlie Baker, Dukakis’ campaign manager in the state, declared: “We don’t expect to win here.”

Dukakis will make a significant investment of time and money--about $500,000--said Baker, who had managed Dukakis’ campaign to victory in the New Hampshire primary. But Baker contended that in Illinois, Dukakis would be at a severe disadvantage running against two hometown favorites, Simon and Jackson, who has long made his home in Chicago.

Chief Adversary

Meanwhile, Gore, who had concentrated much of his efforts in the closing days of the Super Tuesday campaign on damaging Gephardt’s candidacy, moved to lay claim to the role of chief adversary of front-runner Dukakis.

“This will be a two-man race between me and Michael Dukakis,” Gore said from his election-night headquarters in the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. He prepared to move on to Illinois today for a lunchtime factory visit.

Gore acknowledged that Jackson would also be a major candidate but said: “In the voters’ minds, I think they see it as between me and Dukakis.”

He denied that the message he offered in the closing days of his Super Tuesday drive, depicting him as the champion of working people, had been borrowed from his defeated foe, Gephardt.

‘Nothing New’

“For 12 long years, I have fought battles on behalf of working men and women, often against some of the most powerful interests in this country,” Gore contended. “So there’s nothing new at all about that. In every campaign I’ve ever run, in the closing weeks, I have refined and sharpened that message to aim at the core Democratic constituencies. . . .”

Then Gore took after Dukakis with the same vigor he had used against Gephardt. “We have to have the Democratic Party appealing to independently thinking voters and if you look behind the headlines, you’ll find that we did pretty well with independents and independently thinking Democrats and some disillusioned Republicans.

“We’ve got to understand that we’ve lost four of the last five presidential elections. . . . And Mike Dukakis represents the same formula that we tried in 1972 and 1984 and Democrats are hungry for victory this year.”

More for the Money

In the Jackson camp, the obviously elated candidate took satisfaction in the fact that he had gotten more votes for his money than his opponents.

“It’s interesting, in the Deep South, Gore spent $3 million and all of his time here, Dukakis $2 million, Gephardt $1 million. I spent $100,000 and so my message outdistanced a tremendous money disadvantage,” Jackson said. “We’ve certainly run the most cost-efficient campaign.”

Looking back on the past glories of the civil rights movement that drew him into public life, Jackson said: “This week 23 years ago, just this past Sunday, was the attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery. Now just 23 years later, we’re now in a dead-heat contest running for the nomination of our party. It shows that America is getting stronger and better but also that in the South my message began to break through.”

‘Long Process’

Gephardt, who watched the returns from a hotel in his hometown of St. Louis, said the campaign was a “long process, no matter what happens here.”

Gephardt pledged to campaign in Illinois, but his strategists plainly were looking ahead beyond that state, where their slim financial resources would handicap them, to the Michigan Democratic caucuses on March 26.

In Michigan, Gephardt expects important aid from the politically potent United Auto Workers, many of whose leaders look with favor on his candidacy because of his controversial advocacy of tougher U.S. trade policy.

Gephardt and his advisers blamed his disappointing showing in the South on the intensive advertising campaign conducted by Dukakis and Gore, which portrayed him as duplicitous for allegedly shifting positions on issues and also for taking campaign funds from the same interest groups he was supposedly challenging.

‘Negative Advertising’

“We were in a situation where we had about $6 million or $7 million being spent by those two candidates against about a million dollars that we were able to spend,” he said. “And a good deal of their advertising was negative advertising aimed at me. . . .”

The attacks left him no choice except to hit back, Gephardt contended.

“We have tried to run a very positive campaign,” he said. “But we wound up in a situation where both candidates were running negative ads against us and we had to respond. You can’t stand by and let somebody improperly question your integrity.

“We had a problem getting my economic message or economic vision across to voters. We didn’t have enough resources or time to do that,” he said.

“When I can get people to understand my vision for the future we do well. We just couldn’t do that in the South,” he said.

The Southern regional primary that formed the centerpiece of the Super Tuesday voting was created by Southern Democratic Party leaders in the wake of what they saw as the disastrous 1984 election, in which the Democratic ticket failed to carry any Southern states.

These leaders hoped that, by massing the nominating contests of Southern and Border states on the same day, they would ensure an important role for the South in their party’s nominating process and make it more likely that the Democrats would pick a candidate conservative enough to win the region against the Republicans in November.

Excessive Influence

More immediately, Southern Democrats were hoping their new regional mega-primary would counter what they regarded as the excessive influence on the nominating process of Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states to select convention delegates.

In 1984, many Southerners were resentful that two Democratic presidential contenders from their region--former Florida Gov. Reubin Askew and South Carolina Sen. Ernest F. Hollings--were eliminated from consideration because of their poor showings in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

By creating a huge pool of Southern votes early in the process, the architects of Super Tuesday sought to attract a number of Southern candidates into the Democratic competition, one of whom would be able to rally the region’s voters behind his candidacy.

Related stories, photos, Pages 16-19.