Louisiana Primary Called ‘Referendum on Hate’ : Politics: Ex-klan official David Duke runs against heavily favored Sen. J. Bennett Johnston in a race that both parties view as a watershed.

Louisiana voters go to the polls Saturday in a turbulent Senate primary that both parties here view as a political watershed for the state, and perhaps the nation.

At stake is far more than the reelection of Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston. With Republican State Rep. David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan, emerging as Johnston’s principal challenger, the race has become “a referendum on hate,” said Lance Hill, executive director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, an anti-Duke group.

But Duke’s chances of forcing a run-off with Johnston in Louisiana’s unusual open primary system virtually disappeared Thursday when State Sen. Ben Bagert, the official Republican nominee, dropped out of the race and said he would “reluctantly” vote for Johnston. Bagert’s decision came one day after eight Republican senators took the extraordinary step of endorsing Johnston.

Under Louisiana election law, if Johnston receives a majority of the vote Saturday, he will win the race without a run-off in November. To prevent Johnston from crossing the 50% barrier, Duke needed a respectable showing from Bagert.

Unless a last-minute surge provides Duke with a majority, his hopes now rest on the unlikely prospect of the three fringe candidates in the race drawing enough votes to deny Johnston outright victory. Though Bagert’s name will remain on the ballot, his votes will not be counted if he files a formal withdrawal statement with the secretary of state.

“This is ending very, very well,” Johnston said Thursday after he was informed of Bagert’s decision.

Polls taken just before Bagert’s withdrawal already gave Johnston a narrow majority. A Mason-Dixon Opinion Research survey released Wednesday found Johnston favored by 53% of those polled, with 26% backing Duke, who was elected to the State House from a suburban New Orleans district last year. Bagert trailed with just 8%. Another 13% were undecided.

Johnston--a three-term veteran more skilled at quiet legislative deal-making than loud public affirmations--has campaigned stressing his success at bringing home federal dollars to the state. But to audiences here, in Lafayette and in Alexandria this week, he spent more time criticizing Duke than selling himself.

His focus reflects the fact that the race revolves almost entirely around Duke, who has shown surprising popularity. In all polls, Duke has stayed close with Johnston among white voters.

Susan Howell, director of the Survey Research Center at the University of New Orleans, and other local analysts argue that Duke’s biggest problem is that many whites responsive to his slashing attacks on affirmative action and welfare are repelled by his service in the klan. Many here believe that Duke’s support--after growing steadily through the early summer--was capped in late September when Johnston ran a chilling television ad showing Duke leading a klan rally and giving a stiff-armed Nazi-like salute while chanting: “White victory!”

To broaden his appeal, Duke has toned down his rhetoric and proclaimed his involvement in the klan and other far-right groups a “mistake” that he has outgrown. “I’ve moderated over my years,” he insists.

Critics note that he continued to sell neo-Nazi literature from a bookstore in his office until opponents exposed the practice last year and has maintained ties to individuals in anti-Semitic and other extremist groups.

Physically, Duke himself is unremarkable: tall, blond, and soft-spoken. He is the demagogue from GQ: In an appearance before 350 supporters at a Lafayette nightclub on Tuesday, he wore not the tattered linen of the traditional Southern rabble-rouser, but a crisp white shirt and a snappy blue suit.

His speech itself was restrained and unemotional. Like former Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, a man he describes as a political role model, Duke served up a full menu of populist resentments.

When he finished lambasting welfare recipients and foreign aid--familiar villains for the far right--he fired shots at foreign nations that restrict access to U.S. products and political action committees--traditional targets for liberals. One of his loudest ovations came when he declared: “Politics in this nation has been controlled by PACs.”

Duke only perfunctorily raises the issues that dominate most other Senate races. He criticizes the federal budget deal reached earlier this week and promises to oppose tax increases. But Johnston has defused the issue by also criticizing the pact as unfair to lower- and middle-income voters and calling for it to be renegotiated.

Race remains the core of Duke’s appeal. For middle-class voters feeling economically squeezed by hard times in the state, Duke offers an alluring explanation for their distress: Through welfare programs, affirmative action, hiring quotas, and minority set-asides the government has stacked the economic deck against whites. “We have massive discrimination going on,” he says. “It’s called affirmative action.”

In Lafayette, Duke’s all-white audience responded in unusually intimate terms. In conversations across the room, Duke’s supporters radiated the unspoken conviction that his campaign has legitimized the public expression of sentiments kept private for the past 25 years.

Most powerful are the primal images of blacks allegedly cheating the welfare system while whites struggle to make ends meet. One Duke supporter, an oil field worker, said he couldn’t understand why his children who go to school in $25 jeans and sneakers don’t receive free lunches when they are dished out to “the kids wearing $100 jeans and $180 Reeboks.”

Gene Rouly, another oil industry worker, complained of seeing a black man step into a fancy foreign car outside a welfare office.

For both national and local Republicans, Duke’s emotional connection to these voters represents an intractable dilemma. Louisiana GOP leaders fret that Duke has preempted a mainstream Republican challenge to Johnston and could do the same in next year’s reelection bid by Democratic Gov. Buddy Roemer.

National party strategists worry that Duke will tar the party with racism, particularly because many of his current themes--opposition to welfare, busing and affirmative action--have been successfully employed in more muted tones by party leaders from Richard M. Nixon to Ronald Reagan.

“That’s been the element of their appeal that has allowed Republicans to get the big white majorities they need to win in the South,” said political scientist Earl Black, an expert on Southern politics at the University of South Carolina. “The Republicans have wanted those people on the bus. But they have not wanted them driving the bus.”

National Republican leaders have repeatedly disavowed Duke. Though insisting the party did not push Bagert from the race in an effort to defeat Duke, national GOP spokesman Charles Black said Thursday it did nothing to discourage Bagert from withdrawing.

Duke maintains it is unfair for the national GOP to ostracize a candidate with “a perfect Republican conservative voting record.” Rather than trying to quash him, he argues, the GOP should learn from his undiluted attacks against government policies that favor blacks--an argument echoed by some conservative commentators.

Johnston--who had defended segregation as a young lawyer and opposed busing in the Senate--sees the race as an opportunity to send a different message. At each stop, he tells audiences that Saturday’s vote offers a chance to “stop the seed (of racism) before it takes root. . . .”