Helms Trailing Black Rival by 4 to 8 Points, Polls Show : Politics: Challenger controls the issues, accuses senator of doing too little on education, environment.

As the North Carolina Senate campaign heads into its final fortnight, Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, is threatening a stunning upset of conservative icon Jesse Helms.

The most conspicuous evidence of Gantt’s surge is a Charlotte Observer poll published Saturday that showed him 8 percentage points ahead of the three-term Republican incumbent.

Four weeks ago, the same paper’s survey showed the candidates in a dead heat. Three days before the latest Observer poll was released, one commissioned by the National Abortion Rights Action League gave Gantt a 4-point lead.

Helms brushes off the threat by saying: “Every campaign I’ve ever been in has been like (a) root canal.”

His supporters point out that their candidate has been down in the polls before and bounced back. As Helms put it Saturday in Fayetteville, during one of his rare appearances on the stump: “The only poll that counts, as the cliche goes, is the one that will take place on Election Day.”

But other factors are raising the hopes of Gantt’s backers, including bullish campaign finance reports, a sharp rise in Democratic voter registration and, probably most important, Gantt’s success in dominating the issues agenda.

“This campaign is not about flag burning and obscene art,” said Susan Jetton, Gantt’s press secretary, referring to the sort of issues that have been the backbone of Helms’ political appeal.

Instead, the 47-year-old Gantt has, through aggressive tactics and impassioned rhetoric, forced Helms to defend himself against charges that he has done too little to improve education and protect the environment while spending too much time pursuing his pet right-wing causes.

“Nobody has ever criticized him like this before,” said David Procter, who raises hogs and soybeans and is a county coordinator for the Helms campaign.

“This election is really more than Harvey Gantt against Jesse Helms,” Gantt told supporters in Smithfield as he campaigned in the eastern part of the state on Saturday.

“It’s about whether or not we feel it important to make our children the smartest ever . . . whether or not we are going to care for God’s green earth and preserve the environment.”

Gantt’s commercials have listed Helms’ votes against environmental legislation and against federal aid to education, calling Helms “our environment’s worst enemy” and charging that he “has the worst record on education in the U.S. Senate.”

Helms tried at the rally in Fayetteville, about 50 miles south of this state capital, to brush off those attacks with ridicule.

“Mr. Gantt says, ‘I’m for education,’ ” he told a crowd of about 200. “Well, la de da, who doesn’t want better education for our children? But Mr. Gantt’s solution is to throw money at the problem.”

Helms used the same tack in dealing with the environmental issue.

“Anybody not in favor of cleaning up the environment, please raise your hand,” he requested mockingly.

In his television ads, Helms has cited his support for a dropout prevention program and for requiring oil companies to clean up spills.

The result has been to focus attention on the arguments that Gantt is making, rather than on the the anti-government and anti-communism themes that have elected Helms in the past.

But Helms may have thought that he had no choice but to defend himself, given the march of events and population shifts among his constituents.

“With the collapse of the Cold War and the big influx of new people into this state from the North, what Jesse Helms stands for is no longer necessarily what most of the voters here stand for,” said Thad Beyle, a University of North Carolina specialist in state politics.

Moreover, voter concern about education has been intensified by the disclosure that in 1989 North Carolina high school students ranked last in the nation in Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. And interest in the environment has increased along with the running controversy over the state’s so far unsuccessful search for a hazardous waste dump.

The two candidates provided a study in contrasts Saturday as they campaigned only 50 miles or so apart.

Buoyant and self assured--”Harvey Gantt today is smiling way down deep,” he told the rally in Smithfield--Gantt called this campaign a referendum on the nation’s future.

“We have had 10 years of people saying the best government is no government,” he told reporters. “This is a definite shift. We haven’t backed way from what some people call a liberal agenda. We have simply said: ‘Get our fiscal house in order and orient the government to the things we need to be dealing with.’ ”

Helms, on the other hand, looked every one of his 69 years when he arrived in Fayetteville after putting in a rigorous week in the Senate. He was testy with reporters--”I’m not going to let you put words in my mouth,” he snapped at one questioner--and somber in addressing his supporters.

“There may be some aberrations on the political scene,” he warned them. “And I wouldn’t be surprised that I may be one of the victims.”

Still, Helms said that he had just begun to fight. He pointed out that, once Congress adjourns, he will be free of the duties which he says have forced him to restrict his campaigning mainly to weekends.

Moreover, he said, his longtime political adviser is mounting a new wave of television commercials focusing on the problems of crime and drugs and on the death penalty, which Gantt opposes and Helms supports.

Helms is also counting on a massive get-out-the-vote effort, using telephone banks and direct mail in a campaign that adviser Charles Black calls “the most sophisticated I’ve ever seen.”

Adding to the uncertainties of this campaign is the issue of race and the question of how much that issue will hurt Gantt’s candidacy on Election Day. Blacks make up only about 20% of the voting-age population.

Based on previous campaigns, many analysts believe that the impact of race prejudice is disguised in opinion polls because some white voters feel pressured to say that they will support a black candidate.

Nevertheless, there are signs that Gantt is gaining acceptance from white Democrats.

Christopher Scott, president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO, said that the labor federation’s pro-Gantt mailings had produced “negative feedback” from only two of its 114,000 members, more than 70% of whom are white.

In 1984, when the federation backed former Democratic Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. against Helms, negative responses numbered in the hundreds.