Democrats Poised to Take Top Posts in 3 States : Governors: Republican Martinez concedes to Chiles in Florida. GOP expected to lose control of Oklahoma and Kansas.

Early results showed Democrats on the way to capturing crucial governorships Tuesday, as the party won Florida and appeared poised to wrest control of Oklahoma and Kansas from the GOP.

But both parties continued to sweat out results from the richest prizes on the ballot: the California governor’s race between Republican Sen. Pete Wilson and former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein and the explosive Texas struggle between Democrat Ann Richards and Republican businessman Clayton W. Williams Jr.

In Florida, with 7% of the vote counted, former Democratic Sen. Lawton Chiles led incumbent GOP Gov. Bob Martinez 55% to 45%. Martinez conceded defeat.

In Kansas, with only 1% of the vote in, Democrat Joan Finney led Republican Gov. Mike Hayden 59% to 41%, and a CNN survey of voters leaving polling places indicated she was running very strongly.

In Oklahoma, where Republican Gov. Henry Bellmon is stepping down, Democrat David Walters led GOP candidate Bill Price 59% to 41% with 8% of the vote counted.

For Republicans, the best early news came from Massachusetts, where exit polls showed former U.S. Atty. William F. Weld running strongly against Democrat John R. Silber.

With the decennial redistricting of congressional seats impending, both parties devoted unusually heavy attention to governor’s races this year. Democrats went into the election holding 29 of the nation’s 50 governorships, Republicans 21.

Overall, 36 governor’s seats were contested Tuesday--20 of them currently held by Democrats, 16 by Republicans. These included some of the year’s most closely watched campaigns. In particular, the battles for control of Florida, Texas and California--the three states expected to gain the most new congressional seats in next year’s reapportionment--drew enormous national focus and set spending records.

Both the California and Texas races are expected to cost over $45 million when all the bills are totaled, with Williams and Wilson each topping $25 million. In Florida, the totals were lower, largely because Chiles refused to accept contributions greater than $100.

For Republicans, the Florida race became a long-shot as soon as Chiles entered the contest earlier this year. After a bruising primary victory over Rep. Bill Nelson, Chiles virtually coasted to victory over Martinez, who had suffered through a rocky first term.

Stressing his refusal to accept large contributions, Chiles successfully converted the race into a referendum on big-money, slick-media campaigns, offering relatively few specifics about how he would govern the state. In an interview last week, Chiles said he hoped his anti-campaign would serve as a model for other states. “Everything works the old way until somebody changes it,” he said.

If Florida pointed toward a different style of politics, the Texas gubernatorial race became this year’s paradigm of modern slash-and-burn campaigning.

At the outset of the campaigning, Williams, the West Texas oilman who won the Republican nomination largely on the strength of his slick ad campaign, held a double digit lead over Richards, the state treasurer whose image was tarnished during the down and dirty Democratic primary.

Williams lead remained large until early October, when his campaign began to fray at the edges, almost completely because of the Republican’s own verbal gaffes.

When told of a Richards’ claim that she trailed by only five percentage points, Williams replied: “I hope she hasn’t started drinking again.” Richards is a recovering alcoholic who says she has not had a drink in 10 years.

Then, at an event in which both candidates appeared in Dallas, Williams refused to shake Richards’ hand and accused her of being a liar. In late October, while being interviewed on a Dallas television station, Williams confessed ignorance to a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot, even though he had already voted absentee. Finally, last Friday, the millionaire rancher disclosed that he had paid no taxes in 1986.

All this raised fears in Texas that Williams would prove an embarrassment as governor; in the days before the election several Republicans publicly worried that he might turn out to be another Evan Mecham, a reference to the volatile Arizona governor impeached in 1988. Over the last weekend, Williams ran ads acknowledging that he made mistakes during the campaign. But his propensity for them gave Democrats unexpected new life in the days before the vote, despite several appearances on Williams’ behalf by President Bush.

Verbal fireworks also dominated the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts, where tart-tongued Democrat Silber polarized the electorate with a series of acerbic remarks dubbed “Silber shockers.”

Rather than hurting Silber, many of his intemperate remarks reinforced his image as an angry man willing to speak the truth in tough times. Some Democrats began to tout Silber as a future national leader of the party, and perhaps even a presidential candidate. But last week Silber declared that two-income couples were guilty of a form of “child neglect,” and his support began to erode.

Holding a nine-point lead in surveys last week, Silber found himself in a dead heat on the election’s eve.

Staff writers J. Michael Kennedy in Austin and Elizabeth Mehren in Boston contributed to this story.