Record Vote May Cap Louisiana Turmoil : Election: Key to today’s raucous gubernatorial contest is expected to be ballots of white voters who have little stomach for either Duke or Edwards.

It is decision day in Louisiana. Across the state, voters are expected to turn out in record numbers today to settle the gubernatorial race between former Democratic Gov. Edwin W. Edwards and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke--an election whose reverberations will be felt around the nation, if not the world.

After a raucous campaign that has simultaneously riveted and revolted a state accustomed to extravagant elections, surveys conducted earlier this week gave Edwards the lead. But few count out the possibility of a final surge by Duke, a state representative who has run ahead of his polling numbers in previous elections.

Analysts said the key to victory could be which voters turn out--and the final decisions of undecided whites who have little stomach for either Duke or Edwards, whose previous three terms as governor left him with a reputation for womanizing, gambling and corruption.

“The last undecided voters are whites who hate both of them,” said J. Bradford Coker, president of Mason Dixon Opinion Research, which surveyed voters here this week.

In the last hours, both candidates framed the choice in stark terms that underscored the stakes in today’s historic vote.

“When this is over Saturday night, people around the nation are going to say the people of Louisiana are better than we thought they were,” Edwards declared at a Thursday evening rally in New Orleans. “We are not going to go back 60 or 70 years ago to the dark time we had in this state. We’re not going back down that road with David Duke in 1991.”

For his part, Duke contended that he had gained the momentum. “We’re going to be the first state in America to begin to turn it around, to bring this country back to the Christian values it was founded upon,” he told a hooting throng at a Metairie American Legion hall Friday night.

The campaign careened to a close Friday in characteristic fashion, with both candidates fending off new accusations. On Friday morning, Duke held a press conference to release a clip from a 1983 “60 Minutes” interview with Edwards that Duke alleged proved the former governor had sold state appointments in return for campaign contributions in 1971.

Appearing on a New Orleans radio station, Edwards denied and derided the charges. “It was not a selling of jobs kind of thing,” Edwards said, maintaining that he had only discussed the possibility of appointment with some contributors. “Does David Duke think a ’60 Minutes’ program that was aired 10 years ago is a late bomb?”

But earlier, when Duke arrived at the same radio station where Edwards had been interviewed, the Republican also faced new charges: an accusation from California white supremacist Tom Metzger that he had seen Duke use cocaine in the 1970s. “The charge is totally untrue,” Duke said. “This guy is a very strong racist; he is a hateful person.”

Among those who believe that description applies equally to Duke, the campaign’s nervous final days have produced what one activist calls “an apocalyptic mood.”

Fear of Duke--and astonishment at his continued ascent--has attracted into Edwards’ camp an improbable coalition, including business leaders, Republicans and backers of Gov. Buddy Roemer who have long disdained the rakish Democrat. When asked by an Edwards worker if he wanted a poster, one man attending Thursday night’s rally shot back: “You got one that says, vote for the crook, not the racist?”

But despite such sentiments, it appears that many voters unhappy with Edwards--particularly upscale whites who preferred Roemer in the primary--are swallowing their reservations long enough to cast a ballot against Duke.

“Not voting at all crossed my mind after the primary,” said Larry Canada, a New Orleans attorney who initially supported Roemer. “But no vote is a vote for Duke. You can’t stand back at this point in our history and not vote. It would be like being in Germany in 1930 and seeing Adolf Hitler and not doing anything about it.”

Among blacks, who constitute about a quarter of the electorate, organizing for today’s vote dwarfs the efforts made during last year’s U.S. Senate race--when a disappointing minority turnout helped Duke narrow his losing margin against Democrat J. Bennett Johnston. “The black community was kind of caught off guard initially,” said Democratic State Sen. Jon D. Johnson, who has worked to organize black turnout in New Orleans. “Now reality is setting in, and we’re playing catch-up.”

On Friday afternoon, several hundred students turned out for an anti-Duke rally at Xavier University, a private black college in New Orleans. “Tomorrow is the start of the new civil rights movement,” Norman Francis, the university’s president, told the crowd. “It’s no longer Martin Luther King’s movement: It’s your movement.”

Exhorting his own supporters to the polls, Duke on Friday raised the prospect of “a block vote” against him and railed at the political and business leaders rallying behind Edwards.

“Those who try to dictate from outside our borders will see we make our own decisions here in Louisiana,” he said Friday night to an audience so enthusiastic that it re-formed in the parking lot for an impromptu car-honking rally when Duke tried to leave.

This election continues to transfix voters on all sides with its exhilarating and frightening intensity. “I’m 63-years-old and I’ve never seen anything like it,” said former Republican Gov. David Treen, an arch-rival of Edwards who is leading an anti-Duke effort. “This is virtually what everybody talks about everywhere you go. It is very difficult to focus on anything else.”

New Orleans special correspondent Patrick Thomas contributed to this story.

Vote Facts

Here are key facts about Louisiana’s gubernatorial election: Candidates: Edwin W. Edwards and David Duke. Poll times: Open at 6 a.m. CST. Close at 8 p.m. CST. Voter registration: 2,240,264. Racial breakdown: white, 1,599,488; black, 625,429; other races, 15,347. Party breakdown: Democrats, 1,633,571; Republicans, 409,666; other, 197,027. Turnout: Record 72% to 75% expected; current record is 69.56% in 1979 governor’s race. Absentee vote: A record 77,559 ballots. Racial breakdown: white, 64,995; black, 12,225; other, 339. Party breakdown: Democrats, 53,205; Republicans, 18,270; other, 6,084. Source: Associated Press