Koch, Dinkins Locked in Battle for N.Y. Mayor : TV Stations Predict Manhattan Borough Chief to Win Primary; Giuliani Leads in GOP Race

Mayor Edward I. Koch and Manhattan Borough President David N. Dinkins were locked in a tight struggle in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary Tuesday night, but three local television stations projected that Dinkins would emerge the winner.

Former prosecutor Rudolph W. Giuliani took a strong lead over cosmetics millionaire Ronald Lauder in the Republican primary.

Koch was seeking a historic fourth term at City Hall, while Dinkins was trying to become New York’s first black chief executive.

‘Cautiously Optimistic’

“We are cautiously optimistic,” said Bill Lynch, who managed the Dinkins campaign.

“People really wish to heal wounds,” Dinkins said in a television interview after the polls closed. “I always had great faith in the people in our city.

“There is not the polarization some people seem to think. People want to heal the wounds.”

Harrison J. Goldin, the city’s comptroller, and businessman Richard Ravitch ran far behind among Democratic voters.

Giuliani, who established a national reputation fighting drugs and white-collar crime, swept past Lauder among all groups of voters. Lauder, a former ambassador to Austria and the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, spent almost $12 million wooing Republicans. Lauder will remain on the November ballot as the candidate of New York’s Conservative Party.

A New York Newsday/WNBC-TV exit poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times showed only one out of 50 Republican voters said they were influenced by Lauder’s huge television campaign.

Solid Support From Blacks

Dinkins, 62, a barber’s son who sold shopping bags on the streets of Harlem when he was 8 years old, fashioned his predicted victory with solid support in the black communities, strong backing from Latino voters and a higher-than-expected share of the anti-Koch white vote.

As predicted, the Democratic primary was defined by constituency politics. The New York Newsday/WNBC-TV exit poll showed that Dinkins received close to 100% of the black vote. Koch won about two-thirds of white voters, both Jews and Catholics.

What made the election so close was Dinkins’ strength among younger and more liberal white Democrats, who said they had an unfavorable opinion of the often flamboyant three-term mayor.

Three-quarters of the Democrats surveyed by WNBC-TV and New York Newsday said that New York was ready to join such cities as Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit and Atlanta in electing a black mayor. Among Koch’s supporters, about half expressed that sentiment.

A majority of voters said they believed things had gotten worse in New York City over the last year, and in a clear message for the November election, they considered crime and drugs the city’s chief problems.

To a large extent, the primary was a referendum on Koch, who has managed to dominate political discourse in the nation’s largest city for a dozen years. Brash, thin-skinned, constantly campaigning even in non-election years, the mayor staged one of the biggest comebacks in New York’s political history.

How bad was it at the beginning? “It’s Koch against Koch, and Koch is losing,” Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who remained neutral in the Democratic primary, said in surveying the difficult road ahead for the mayor.

Early Campaign Start

In the face of huge negative job approval ratings, the 64-year-old mayor began his television commercials ahead of his competition, stressing the city’s so-far successful effort to build more than $5 billion in low-income housing through the words of minority construction workers. In these commercials, the mayor’s face was tucked away in one corner, so small it almost took a magnifying glass to find it.

As the campaign progressed, the commercials got tougher. One ad featured a white police officer who was shot and paralyzed in the line of duty.

“Ed Koch is a mayor who is good for our cops and our kids, too,” the policeman told potential voters. “He is a mayor who knows that the things that unite us outweigh the things that divide us. He hurts when we hurt. He smiles when we smile. He leads when others lead.”

Koch did not directly attack Dinkins, in part, strategists said, for fear of alienating black Democrats in the November election.

Throughout the primary, Dinkins ran on the premise he was the candidate best able to bring the city together again. He campaigned with the Rev. Jesse Jackson in an effort to energize the black community, with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) in East Harlem seeking Latino votes.

Theme of Unification

But his commercials carried a consistent theme: He could unify the city. They stressed he had fought hard against bigotry all his life, that he had received death threats after denouncing the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, who had disparaged Jews. Seeking to make inroads in Koch’s traditionally strong Jewish constituency, Dinkins told voters he had traveled to West Germany with a delegation of the American Jewish Congress to protest President Ronald Reagan’s visit to a Nazi cemetery.

Seeking to overcome charges by Koch supporters that he wasn’t tough enough to run New York City, the candidate’s campaign slogan proclaimed: “The type of man he is, the kind of mayor he’ll be . . . the quiet courage that proves you don’t have to be loud to be strong.”

In contrast to elections in some other cities, the issue of racial conflict in New York grew somewhat muted in the closing days of the campaign after the firestorm of Bensonhurst, the white Brooklyn neighborhood where a black youth was killed after being confronted by a white gang. Following the death, both Koch and Dinkins made a sustained effort to keep polarization under control, rather than try to openly exploit it as in mayoral elections in Philadelphia and Chicago.

In the final days of the primary, Koch ran as a unifier, superimposing his own buoyant personality upon the Manhattan borough president’s theme of healing. The mayor even proposed, and Dinkins agreed, to appear together at a post-primary unity conference Wednesday.

On Tuesday, after casting his ballot, Koch emerged from the voting booth flashing a thumb’s up sign. He later visited one of his phone banks and took the telephone from a volunteer and talked to a family, trying to convince them to vote for him.

Later, he turned philosophical. “I expect to win. It’s quite possible to lose,” he told reporters. “Very few people in this country have had as marvelous a political life as I had.”