Helms, Gantt About Even After N. Carolina Struggle : Senate: Contest has become a barometer of race’s role in Southern politics. Both candidates end with ad blitz, push for a big voter turnout.

At the end of a bitter struggle that has become a barometer on the role of race in Southern politics, white incumbent GOP Sen. Jesse Helms and black challenger Harvey Gantt Monday pushed for big voter turnouts in the nation’s most-watched Senate contest.

Campaigning across the state and blitzing the airwaves with commercials, the two men wound up a race many consider too close to call. However, an opinion poll published Saturday in the Charlotte Observer put Gantt ahead 47% to 41%, with 12% either undecided or refusing to say how they will vote.

On Monday Helms continued his attack focusing heavily on racial issues, including affirmative action, minority ownership of broadcast facilities and Gantt’s support of the civil rights bill that President Bush vetoed.

Gantt has retaliated by hammering on Helms’ 18-year record in the Senate, portraying the conservative senator as ineffective and out of touch with the state’s voters. Gantt castigated Helms for opposing a woman’s right to choose abortion and for his record on the environment and education in a state that lags on both.

The final days of the campaign have been “hellacious,” Helms’ tactics in particular, said Thad Beyle, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina.

“It’s like Helms saved all those negative ads until the end of the campaign,” he said.

The ads appear to have mobilized Helms’ white base of support and knocked Gantt off balance, slowing his momentum.

But Gantt, speaking to reporters Monday in a hoarse voice, rejected that notion. “I don’t have much of a voice, but my spirit is willing, and we shall win,” he said. “I’ve never thought the momentum ever shifted.”

At a news conference, Helms rejected charges that his ads were unfair, telling reporters: “They claimed one time that Mr. (Harry) Truman was giving ‘em hell. And he said: ‘I’m not giving ‘em hell. I’m telling the truth on ‘em, and they think it’s hell.’ ”

As a measure of the role race is playing in the contest, the Justice Department said Monday it was sending a team of lawyers to North Carolina to ensure that minority voters aren’t disqualified from voting based on information gathered by the state Republican Party.

Assistant Atty. Gen. John R. Dunne said the state GOP has pledged not to use any information it obtained from postcards it sent out advising voters that they were ineligible to cast ballots if they had moved in the last 30 days.

Democratic officials feared that if the postcards were returned as non-deliverable, indicating that someone had moved, they could be used to challenge eligibility of voters at the polls today.

Democrats also charged that postcards were sent to intimidate black voters.

Earlier in the day, a federal judge in Newark, N.J., held that the Republican National Committee was not involved in the North Carolina mailings, which Democrats charged violated a 1982 consent decree signed by the national GOP.

Here in Salisbury, a town of 24,000, the racial split was apparent: black voters are solidly for Gantt, but white voters are more diverse, with some for Gantt, others for Helms.

“That’s my man,” said Robert Steele, a 70-year-old black man, referring to Gantt. “It’s time we have a chance at something.”

Jim Zachary, an 89-year-old white man who said he has voted for Helms in the past, said the senator “has been in 18 years, so he must be doing something right.”

Many analysts expect more whites than the polls currently indicate will vote for Helms. Of the 12% in the Charlotte Observer poll who were undecided or refusing to name their choice, 83% were white.

Helms and Gantt each depended on out-of-state contributions for roughly two-thirds of their campaign budgets. Helms raised a total of $12.8 million and Gantt raised $5.6 million.