Illinois Vote Today Offers Dukakis a Test of Strength

In the 1988 presidential campaign’s first primary in a major industrial state, Illinois voters today will provide a test of strength for Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the Democrats’ narrow front-runner, and give Vice President George Bush, the overwhelming favorite in the Republican race, an opportunity to all but clinch his party’s nomination.

Opinion polls in the closing hours of the Democratic campaign showed the state’s two favorite sons, Sen. Paul Simon and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, locked in a battle for first place that was too close to call.

Dukakis, who leads in delegates won so far and in national opinion polls, seemed to be gaining ground at Simon’s expense. But many party leaders believe that unless he can improve on his current third-place standings in the Illinois polls, Dukakis will have lost a chance to build on the momentum from his successes in last week’s Super Tuesday contests.

The other active Democratic contender in this state, Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr., was struggling to avoid a shellacking so ignominious it could tarnish the luster he had gained through his Super Tuesday victories in his home region of the South.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side, despite polling results that indicated he faced a landslide defeat at the hands of Bush, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole reiterated in no uncertain terms his previous pledge to carry on the fight beyond Illinois. “Whatever happens (in Illinois),” he said, “we’re going to keep going, going.”

But later in a live interview on NBC News, when pressed on the point, Dole seemed to hedge. “I’ll make that decision (whether to go on) after tomorrow,” he said.

And the only other surviving GOP contender, former religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, who had often vowed to battle on to the end of the campaign, also for the first time sounded an ambiguous note about the future. “I’m not Don Quixote,” he said. “I’m not going to tilt against windmills.”

Democratic and Republican candidates alike are competing on two levels. One, a so-called beauty contest, which measures the popular vote, has considerable symbolic significance but has no direct bearing on the other, which is the struggle for convention delegates chosen in each of the state’s 22 congressional districts.

Simon Seeks to Win Both

Simon, the longtime leader in the Democratic campaign in this state, has run up a string of losses elsewhere and has said that he will abandon his candidacy unless he can win both the beauty contest and the delegate contest here.

The senator has been dropping in the polls here since Super Tuesday, a fact pointed up by a headline in the Chicago Tribune on Monday: “Simon Keeps Losing Ground as Primary Nears.” The headline and the poll results it was based on got heavy play in local television news programs, causing concern among some Simon supporters that it would add to his downward momentum.

“It’s not the headline I would have chosen,” said Michael Daly, Illinois coordinator of Simon’s campaign. But, he added hopefully, “I think it will give added impetus and incentive to our supporters.”

Indeed, some analysts speculated that the reports of Simon’s decline, coupled with Jackson’s much-heralded gains, might help the senator get last-minute support from white voters resentful of Jackson’s candidacy on racial and other grounds.

Viewed With Ambivalence

In the Jackson camp, the future of Simon’s candidacy was viewed with a certain amount of ambivalence.

On the one hand, Jackson and his advisers are hoping for a first-place finish in the beauty contest to boost his prestige and to add to his delegate totals. Thus Jackson swept through central Illinois on Monday, trying to boost his popular vote totals and also in some places, notably East St. Louis, hoping to win convention delegates beyond his base of black support in Chicago’s inner city.

On the other hand, Jackson’s strategists are mindful that if Simon is forced out of the race, it could be costly to Jackson. “For our purposes we of course like to have Paul Simon around because he takes votes from Mike Dukakis,” said Gerald Austin, Jackson’s campaign manager.

As for Dukakis, his director of field operations, Jack Corrigan, contended that the governor’s investment here of time and money will have been worthwhile even if he fails in his main objective--to drive Simon out of the race--and if Dukakis fails to finish better than third.

“Would I prefer to do better than that? Sure,” Corrigan conceded. But he said that by campaigning in the state, “we have made a down payment on future competitions, for delegates and in the general election.”

Gore concluded his Illinois campaign Monday with stops at an auto parts plant in Rockford, a press conference in Peoria, a homeless shelter in Springfield and the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, struggling to get his vote total into double digits despite his lack of recognition in this state.

On the Republican side, Bush, leading his nearest opponent Dole by a margin of more than 2 to 1 in the polls and favored to add most of Illinois’ contingent to the nominating convention to his already big delegate totals, was taking nothing for granted.

Starting out soon after dawn at a Des Plaines train station where he greeted Chicago-bound commuters, the vice president then flew to Springfield and Carbondale for airport rallies before closing out his campaign here with a countdown celebration in Chicago.

Although Bush warned his supporters against taking victory for granted, he seemed to brim over with confidence that he had the nomination wrapped up.

‘Bring Together’ Republicans

“I want to conduct myself today, tomorrow and on in the future in a way to bring together all the Republicans,” he told a crowd inside the Springfield airport fire station. “And I am convinced that if I conduct myself properly in winning this nomination that we have nothing to worry about from the gloom-sayers that are running on the Democratic side.”

But if Bush was looking ahead to party harmony, Dole was by no means yet prepared to think along those lines. Not even pressure from the White House would get him to quit the race now, he said as he spent much of the day sniping at Bush in Chicago’s financial community.

“Do we want to elect momentum or do we want to elect the best candidate,” he told a breakfast meeting of the Chicago Executive Club. Later, pressing his way through the raucous trading pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Dole shouted above the din: “Sell Bush short.”

The other likely GOP also-ran in Illinois, Robertson, indicated that if he wins 9% or so of the popular vote and a handful of delegates he would be happy. But he continued: “If I do dismally here--2% to 3%--that’s a different matter.”

Scoffs at Protection

Continuing to court controversy, Robertson scoffed at the idea of using condoms to protect sexually active persons from contracting AIDS.

Addressing a luncheon audience in Chicago, he contended that he had read a report by a Florida physician which argued that “telling people to use condoms to avoid AIDS is like telling the passengers on the Titanic that they wouldn’t drown if they put shower caps on their heads. . . . There is no such thing any more as safe sex except continence outside, and fidelity within, marriage.”

Staff writers John Balzar, Cathleen Decker, Douglas Jehl, Ron Harris and Bob Secter contributed to this story.