FLA. SENATE SEAT NARROWLY WON BY GOP’S MACK

MIAMI — Conservative Republican Rep. Connie Mack won a cliffhanger Senate race Thursday over Rep. Buddy MacKay, a moderate Democrat, for the seat being relinquished by Democratic Sen. Lawton Chiles.

Mack’s narrow victory, based on absentee ballots still being counted, decided the last of this year’s 33 Senate races. It means the Democrats will have a 55-45 majority, a gain of one seat, in the new U.S. Senate.

But while Mack claimed victory, MacKay did not immediately concede, and his campaign manager said there might be a legal challenge because of what he called irregularities in some vote totals.

“I think at this point the numbers are conclusive,” Mack said in a telephone interview. “It’s very exciting.

“I don’t know the exact word to use. . . . There’s been a great deal of anxiety. It’s been long, it’s been tough, but I felt all along that my message of more freedom; free markets, freedom from taxes, freedom as an objective of our foreign policy, would come through clearly,” said Mack, 48, the grandson of the former owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics.

The AP’s latest tally showed Mack with 2,044,575 votes to MacKay’s 2,014,924 votes--50.4% to 49.6%. Mack’s margin of nearly 30,000 votes was more than enough to avoid the automatic recount that would be triggered under state law if the difference were less than about 20,000. About 5,000 absentee votes remained to be counted in Bay County, a Mack stronghold.

MacKay’s campaign manager, Greg Farmer, said MacKay planned to confer with legal advisers to discuss taking the election to court, as Farmer recommended.

“We may have to ask the fat lady for an encore,” Farmer said.

“Something’s screwy with those numbers.”

Farmer said that the way races were listed on the ballots may have confused voters in some counties. He cited three counties where more votes were cast for President than Senate: Hillsborough County, where the difference was nearly 60,000; Palm Beach, where it was nearly 52,000, and Dade, nearly 49,000.

“Mike Dukakis got more votes in Palm Beach than Buddy MacKay? C’mon, now,” Farmer said by telephone.

On election night, all three major television networks declared that MacKay would win, based on their exit polls. But Mack moved ahead Wednesday as partial results from 134,000 absentee ballots came in. The absentee ballots have traditionally favored Republicans in Florida, and the GOP earlier this year had a special drive to register supporters likely to vote by absentee ballot.

Mack, a former bank president, and MacKay, 55, a lawyer, both were elected to the Congress in 1982.