Wofford Leads Early Pennsylvania Returns : Elections: Underdog holds edge over Thornburgh for Senate. GOP loses Kentucky governor race.

Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford took an early lead over Republican challenger Dick Thornburgh Tuesday night in a special election in Pennsylvania marked by underdog Wofford’s efforts to exploit voter discontent with Washington in general and President Bush’s domestic policies in particular.

With 3% of Pennsylvania’s precincts reporting, Wofford had 47,137 votes or 68%, to 21,992 votes or 32% for Thornburgh.

In another election with national implications, voters in Washington state had the opportunity to demonstrate their resentment of politicians by supporting a term-limit ballot initiative.

The most severe proposal of its kind ever submitted to the electorate, the Washington initiative not only would limit members of the House of Representatives to three two-year terms and U.S. senators to two six-year terms, it would count past service toward the limits.

Washington voters also considered a measure to make Washington state the only place in the world to legalize doctors’ assistance in suicide for terminally ill patients.

Meanwhile, in the only two gubernatorial contests on the ballot in this off-year election, the Democratic lieutenant governor won in Kentucky and the Democratic incumbent was trailing in early returns in Mississippi.

Kentucky Lt. Gov. Brereton C. Jones defeated Republican Rep. Larry Hopkins in the contest to succeed incumbent Democrat Gov. Wallace Wilkinson, who was barred from seeking another term. With 75% of the precincts reporting, Jones had 383,489 votes, or 64%, to Hopkins’ 212,159, or 36%.

Hopkins offered his congratulations to Jones just after 8 p.m. EST, one of the earliest concessions in recent Kentucky elections.

In Mississippi, with 8% precincts reporting, Republican Kirk Fordice, a construction company president from Vicksburg making his first bid for public office, had 19,114 votes, or 52%. Democratic incumbent Ray Maubus had 17,415, or 47%.

But it was the special election in Pennsylvania to fill out the term of Republican Sen. John Heinz, who was killed in a plane crash last spring, that dominated national attention. The race was widely viewed as the most significant test yet of voter reaction to the state of the economy since the onset of the recession last year and the fading of hopes for a recovery this fall.

Advisers to Thornburgh, who had resigned as attorney general to mount the race in his home state, acknowledged that the sputtering recovery had hurt their cause.

“The race didn’t really begin to tighten up until we got some bad news about auto sales about two weeks ago,” said Fred Steeper, who has conducted opinion polls for Thornburgh and also for the Republican National Committee and the White House.

The Pennsylvania race also attracted attention because of Wofford’s aggressive populist rhetoric. Foreshadowing tactics that Democrats are expected to use in their bid to regain the White House next year, Wofford accused Bush of neglecting domestic needs while he pursued foreign affairs. Wofford also called for creation of a national health insurance system to help financially squeezed middle-class voters meet the burden of rising medical costs.

Adding drama to the contest was the fact that the 65-year-old Wofford, appointed to the vacancy by Democratic Gov. Robert Casey, had never run for public office before and was not well-known in the state. As a result, he seemed to be a sort of Democratic David pitted against a Republican Goliath, in the person of the 59-year-old Thornburgh, who had served two terms as Pennsylvania governor from 1978 to 1986 and was closely identified with Bush.

Starting off nearly 45 percentage points behind Thornburgh in opinion polls, Wofford had closed the gap by last week and turned the race into what amounted to a dead heat on election day.

“It was 46 to 46 when we stopped tracking on (last) Wednesday,” Wofford campaign manager Paul Begala said. But Begala claimed that Wofford still had the momentum, citing the large turnouts for rallies in the campaign’s closing days.

“We had 400 people waiting to hear him at Greensburg (in western Pennsylvania) at midnight on Saturday, and the temperature was 26 degrees,” Begala said.

On Monday, in downtown Philadelphia, his hometown, Wofford told another sizable crowd: “It’s time to push the forces of greed out of the corridors of power.”

The “corridors of power” phrase initially had been used by Thornburgh in his announcement speech to underline his familiarity with Washington, where he had run the Justice Department for both Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush. But the words later became a hallmark of Wofford’s campaign rhetoric as he sought to turn Thornburgh’s supposed advantage against him.

By campaign’s end, the resentful mood of the electorate had come to be the dominant and decisive factor in the Pennsylvania race, although observers were uncertain which side would benefit most from the negative climate.

“It’s a question of who they (the voters) want to protest against most,” said Thornburgh pollster Steeper. “Is it going to be against the government in Washington or the governor of Pennsylvania and his unpopular tax hike?”

In an effort to resolve the question in Thornburgh’s favor, his campaign struck back hard at Wofford in the closing days of the race, with commercials and stump speeches depicting Wofford’s call for national health insurance as impractical and costly.

Thornburgh likened Wofford’s proposals to a health plan that he claimed had recently been abandoned by the Soviet Union and said it proved that his foe was “out of sync with the times.” Thornburgh put forward his own ideas for cutting health costs by making doctors and hospitals compete for business and limiting the legal liability of doctors for malpractice.

As a result, Steeper claimed, he detected “an uptick” in his polling in Thornburgh’s favor last Thursday, the last day he surveyed voter opinion. “I think our message is starting to click.”

But Steeper acknowledged that it was Wofford, not Thornburgh, who represented change, an attribute that was bound to attract support from the discontented.