Returns Show Little Incumbent Backlash : Politics: Senators and representatives doing well in races. But the GOP loses some governorships.

Early returns from U.S. House and Senate races showed only slight evidence of a much-heralded backlash against incumbents Tuesday as voters went to the polls in a midterm election dominated by heated debate over taxes and growing anxiety over the nation’s economy.

There was one dramatic exception: two-term New Jersey Democrat Bill Bradley, a seemingly invincible senator with bright presidential prospects, was locked in an astoundingly close race with a relatively unknown GOP challenger, Christine Todd Whitman.

Whitman, a former state public utilities commissioner, had built her campaign on an effort to link Bradley to the intensely unpoular tax increase package proposed by Democratic Gov. James Florio. With about one-third of the state’s precincts counted, the two were dead even.

In North Carolina, in the day’s most symbolically important Senate race, where Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, was challenging three-term Republican incumbent and conservative bulwark Jesse Helms, Helms held a narrow lead with about 40% of the vote counted. And the balloting was shadowed by a burst of last-minute legal challenges from both camps.

Democrats won governorships in Florida, Kansas, Oklahoma and Rhode Island, all previously held by Republicans, but the GOP took over the governorship in Ohio.

At stake in the nationwide balloting were 35 seats in the Senate, all 435 seats in the House, 36 governorships and numerous state and local offices.

Potentially more important than the individual races was the chance to control or at least influence the reapportionment of state legislatures and ultimately the House of Representatives. Reapportionment will be based on population shifts reflected in the 1990 census, but governors and state legislators will have broad power to shape the new electoral districts.

Also involved in Tuesday’s voting was the prestige of President Bush, whose popularity had been eroded by his handling of the prolonged controversy over the federal budget deficit. After campaigning intensively for Republican candidates around the country for the last 10 days, Bush voted in Houston on Tuesday before returning to the White House.

The Democratic victory in the Florida governor’s race, where former U.S. Sen. Lawton Chiles defeated incumbment Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, was particularly signficant because Florida, along with California and Texas, was one of three big, fast-growing states that are critical battlegrounds in the struggle over reapportionment.

The Sunshine State is expected to gain at least three House seats as a result of the 1990 census. Controlling the governorship, along with the both houses of the state legislature--where existing Democratic majorities were expected to continue--will give the party a big advantage in the redistricting process.

In Kansas, the victory of Democrat Joan Finney, the state treasurer, over two-term Republican incumbent Mike Hayden was aided by voter resentment at a tax increase pushed through by Hayden.

In the Senate races, Republican incumbents in Kentucy, Indiana and New Hampshire appeared to have held on to their seats, though at one time or another all were considered likely targets for Democratic challengers hoping to take advantage of voter concern over the economy.

In Kentucky, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell won election to a second term despite a late surge by Democrat Harvey Sloane, a former Louisville mayor and non-practicing physician who sought to make a populist appeal on economic issues.

Indiana GOP Sen. Dan Coats, who originally was appointed to the Senate to replace Vice President Dan Quayle, defeated Democratic challenger Baron Hill. And. in New Hampshire, Republican Rep. Robert C. Smith took the Senate seat being vacated by GOP Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey, who was stepping down to run for the state legislature. Smith beat former Democratic Sen. John Durkin.

Meanwhile, three Democratic senators--Carl Levin of Michigan, John Kerry of Masachusetts and Paul Simon of Illinois, all of whom Republcians once thought could be easily unseated, were apparently reelected, according to CBS News projections.

In Michigan, Republican Rep. Bill Schuette tried to portray Levin, who was seeking a third term, as an out-of-touch liberal weak on defense; while in Masachusetts, Republican Jim Rappaport, a millionaire real estate developer and lawyer, sought to link the liberal Kerry, seeking a second term, to the vastly unpopular adminstration of Gov. Michael Ss. Dukakis.

In Illinois, Simon’s liberal image and his failed 1988 presidential bid were thought to make him a prime target for his Republican challenger, Rep. Lynne Martin, a political moderate. But Simon was able to capitalize on two summer events, the nomination of David H. Souter to the Supreme Court and the deployment of U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf. His membership on key Senate committees dealing with the issues made him a highly visible commentator on Illinois’ airwaves.

Also winning reelection were incumbent Sens. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), William S. Cohen (R-Me.), Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), John W. Warner (R-Va.), John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.), David L. Boren (D-Okla.), Al Gore (D-Tenn.) and Phil Gramm (D-Tex.).

Early returned yielded only one defeated incubment, freshman Rep. Peter Smith of Vermont, who was upset by Bernard Sanders, the former mayor of Burlington, Vt., and a socialist, the first socialist to be elected to the Congress since 1929.

Smith’s candidacy won national attention two weeks ago when President Bush went to New Hampshire to campaign for him. Smith, determined to demonstrate his indpendence, made a point of declaring in the President’s presence that he was unhappy with some White House policies, such as the veto of the civil rights bill.

Smith had been considered highly vulnerable since he was elected with only 41% of the vote in a three-way contest two years ago. Sanders, who campaigned on such populist issues such as health care and the middle-class tax burden, had come close to winning the seat in 1988.

By the time voters went to the the polls, the 1990 campaign had gone through a series of drastic twists and turns that had made it seem particularly spasmodic, even by the standards governing midterm elections.

The final round of the Battle of the Budget in Washington, with the federal government forced to shut down, albeit briefly, and the President flip-flopping on what he would accept, only added to the effect.

Yet the battle that confronted voters Tuesday as they delivered their verdict on the candidates and the issues had begun to take shape more than a year earlier--in the summer of 1989. And decisions made at that time turned out to have a substantial impact on the over-all outcome of Tuesday’s voting.

It was then that politicians, their fingers to the political winds, began making the initial critical decisions about their own careers: whether to run or retire, whether to seek higher office or stay put.

At the time, conditions appeared very favorable for Republicans. The peace and relative prosperity that had helped Bush win the White House still prevailed. The President’s own approval rating seemed to set a new record with each successive opinion survey.

In addition, Republican prospects seemed brightened by the charges of ethical misbehavior that had shaken the House Democratic leadership. GOP strategists talked hopefully of using the example of House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, accused of violating the House rules restricting outside income, as the spark for igniting voter indignation.

Taken all together, things looked so good that the GOP talked of reversing historical tradition, which dictates that the party controlling the White House loses ground in off-year elections. They dreamed, if not of gaining seats, at least of holding their own and thus positioning the party for an attempt to reclaim the House from the Democrats in 1992.

“It is possible we can get a majority of Republicans back in the Senate this year,” Vice President Quayle told Republican state chairmen as recently as last spring, despite their 10 seat disadvantage in that body.

But some ambitious House Republicans looked at the bright prospects and saw an opportunity not to hold on to their offices but to ascend the political ladder. No fewer than eight GOP House members decided to give up their relatively safe jobs to seek places in the Senate. Two other Republicans quit the House to run for governorships and one resigned to run for lieutenant governor.

In contrast to this surge of upward mobility among the Republicans, no Democratic House members ventured to try for a Senate seat, although five did announce for governorships in their states.

For Republican fortunes nationwide, the result of these decisions was to dilute the enormous advantage of incumbency and make it potentially harder to record net gains in the House if and when the political climate turned less sunny--as it did by Election Day.

At least one Democratic House member, Rep. Ron Wyden of Oregon, and two other prominent Democrats, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota and former Gov. Jim Hunt of North Carolina, decided not to challenge supposedly formidable Republican senators. They had reason months later to ponder these decision as the Senate campaigns in all three states turned into surprisingly close contests.

Though the economy was healthy enough in most of the country, a severe slump in the Northeast, the party’s regional stronghold, cast another cloud over the Democrats’ prospects. The downturn threatened their chances of maintaining control of three New England states where Democratic governors were in office: Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut.

More fundamentally, Democrats seemed to lack both a compelling message and the confidence required to find one.

When one of their number, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, came up with a plan for cutting the Social Security withholding tax, a proposal even Republicans conceded was politically attractive, the party’s congressional leadership was slow to respond--paralyzed by fear that any support for cutting taxes would make them look fiscally irresponsible even though Bush and other Republicans were openly pushing other tax cuts.

But slowly, as the political calendar advanced into the spring and summer of 1990, circumstances began to turn against Republicans. Speaker Wright resigned and faded from the public eye, overshadowed by mounting public indignation over the savings and loan debacle. And the economic slump began to spread from the Northeast into other regions, increasing fears of a nationwide recession and underlining the urgency of dealing with the federal deficit.

Finally, late last June came the break Democrats had long been waiting for.

Locked in negotiations with the Democrats over the federal budget and pressured by the slowing economy and the mounting cost of the S&L; bailout, the President declared his willingness to accept a tax increase--violating his celebrated read-my-lips campaign pledge.

Democrats immediately charged that Bush’s real reason for raising taxes was to ensure that the Treasury could pay off his wealthy friends in the savings and loan industry.

“We have found the one cause for which George Bush is willing to break his ‘no new taxes’ pledge--the bankers and speculators who ran the savings and loan industry into the ground,” Democratic National Chairman Ron Brown contended.

Reaction against what Bush had done was even more vociferous within his own party.

In defiance of the President’s new position, a majority of the Republican members of the House of Representatives went on record against a tax increase. And, in a number of states, Republican candidates who had been running on a no-new-taxes platform stuck to their guns, making a point of declaring their independence from their President and his newly declared acceptance of tax increases.

Public opinion turned gloomy. A survey by Market Opinion Research, a respected Republican firm, showed that, by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1, Americans believed that the country was heading down “the wrong track, “ a finding that one Republican congressional campaign strategist called “horrendous.”

In midsummer, more than 6,000 miles from the White House, an event occurred that for a time seemed to overshadow all else: Saddam Hussein, despotic ruler of Iraq, launched a brutal invasion of Kuwait and Bush responded forcefully, organizing an international alliance to defend Saudi Arabia and restore the sovereignty of Kuwait.

Mindful of the public’s tendency to rally behind the President in times of international crisis, the Democrats prudently announced their support for Bush’s Mideast commitment. Though continuing to criticize his domestic policies, they found it hard to get though to a public preoccupied with Operation Desert Shield.

The Democratic attack on the GOP seemed blunted, and GOP hopes revived.

“The Mideast froze debate on domestic issues,” recalled Paul Tully, political director of the Democratic National Committee.

But, as summer turned into fall, and the confrontation with Iraq turned into stalemate, the stage was set for yet another transformation of the political landscape.

Attention shifted back to domestic issues, principally the budget negotiations between the White House and the Democratic controlled Congress. Once again, the Democrats gained the initiative.

The prolonged haggling over the budget hurt the Republicans.

Staff writers Sara Fritz and Paul Houston contributed to this story.