President Rolls On, but Protest Vote Continues : GOP: Buchanan loses eight primaries but vows to keep fighting. Bush’s showing improves over earlier contests.

President Bush emerged from Super Tuesday still undefeated in his drive for renomination, but he seemed no closer to driving challenger Patrick J. Buchanan out of the race.

Election night offered the President a generally brightening picture. He easily won all eight of the day’s Republican primaries, continuing to expand his already huge lead in convention delegates. And in several of the contests, his margin of victory over Buchanan improved noticeably in comparison with earlier primaries.

Still, the results showed that voters in the eight states--six in the South and Southwest, two in New England--continued a pattern of protest voting set in earlier contests. Bush consistently lost between a quarter and a third of GOP voters. Moreover, in the key state of Florida, a Los Angeles Times exit poll found 41% of GOP voters said they disapproved of Bush’s job performance. In Texas, Bush’s home state, the poll found 33% disapproved.

Despite such potential problems, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater touted the night as a “clean sweep” for the President. Buchanan’s campaign manager and sister, Angela (Bay) Buchanan, admitted that her brother’s nomination propsects are “about as long a shot as it could be.” But she insisted that under no conditions could she picture him dropping out before the GOP convention in August.

Buchanan, for his part, still has not yet found a formula for victory, and his vote total has not risen above the 37% he received in the Feb. 18 New Hampshire primary. On Super Tuesday, Buchanan did best in Florida, a state where he did not campaign the past week, and worst in Mississippi, where he devoted much of his energies.

Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, meanwhile, received sharply limited support in the states where he was on the ballot.

Bush, who led the delegate tally over Buchanan by 184 to 20 before Tuesday, seemed headed toward winning the vast majority of the 420 delegates at stake in the day’s contests. An Associated Press tally indicated that Bush would win at least 370 of the delegates, bringing him more than halfway to the 1,105 delegates needed to win the nomination.

Even before Super Tuesday’s results began coming in, some leading Republicans began urging Buchanan to drop out of the race for the good of the party, expressing concern that his continued attacks on Bush could harm the party’s chances of retaining the White House in November.

“When it’s over, it’s over,” said Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas.

“Pat’s got to decide whether it is his primary interest to help defeat liberals (or) . . . whether it is his strategic intent to defeat the President, bring down the Republican Party and rebuild on the wreckage,” Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) told reporters at the White House Tuesday morning.

But Buchanan made clear his defiance and laid plans for a renewed assault, featuring themes that could haunt Bush in November.

In a speech to supporters at a rally in a Detroit suburb, the challenger proclaimed that “in the Buchanan lexicon, there is no such word as ‘quit.’ ”

“We may be losing the battle for delegates, but we’re not losing this national debate and everyone knows it,” he said. “We’re going forward, my friends, because a national campaign and presidential primaries (are) more than about delegates, and even elections and nominations and titles. They’re about the way this great, grand republic is going to debate and decide her destiny.

Buchanan aides said that after emphasizing “traditional value” themes in the South, the challenger now plans to return to the themes of economic discontent that fueled his drive in New Hampshire, where he first shocked Bush by running a surprisingly strong race against the President.

Buchanan intends to focus that line of attack on recession-ravaged Michigan, where he plans to spend five of the next six days leading up to the primary there next Tuesday. As he arrived in Detroit on Tuesday, Buchanan shot back at Gingrich, saying of his campaign: “You tell Newt it will be completed in August at the Houston convention after the California primary” on June 5.

Bush supporters expressed hope Tuesday night that come the November election, most of Buchanan’s voters would back the President.

Buchanan’s approach to the campaign could put that hope in doubt. His campaign officials plan to air a television advertisement in Michigan that attacks senior Bush advisers for having worked as lobbyists for Japanese firms, a move Buchanan’s forces hope will hurt the President in a state where the automobile industry has been particularly hurt by overseas competition.

The ads are designed to emphasize an issue, and appeal to a constituency, that Democrats also hope to reach in the general election.

Here is a look at Super Tuesday’s Republican primaries:

MISSISSIPPI--At one point, Buchanan and his aides thought Mississippi, with 32 delegates, could be the state where they would break through. Instead, it provided a clear illustration of Buchanan’s vulnerabilities, with Bush prevailing handily.

With 92% of the vote counted, Bush had 72% of the vote to only 17% for Buchanan and 11% for Duke--the highest vote total for Duke in any of Tuesday’s contests.

Buchanan’s attempt to appeal to the state’s overwhelmingly conservative Republicans ran straight into the Bush campaign’s ability to highlight Buchanan’s negatives with tough campaign advertising, and by Tuesday night, top Buchanan aides were second-guessing their judgment.

Buchanan staged his final campaign day in Mississippi on Monday, delivering blistering speeches before conservative audiences that denounced abortion and homosexuality and attacked Bush for abandoning “traditional values.” But in the end, the effort yielded little.

“The toughest thing in the South turned out to be loyalty to a sitting President,” Buchanan political director Paul Erickson said in an interview.

Bush visited the state over the weekend, and his campaign poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into television spots attacking Buchanan, with nearly all of them airing in Mississippi and neighboring Louisiana. Much of the advertising concentrated on Buchanan’s opposition to the Persian Gulf War.

The advertising clearly took its toll. At campaign stops in Mississippi on Monday, Buchanan ran into repeated questions from voters about the war and considerable skepticism about his answers.

LOUISIANA--Buchanan had the support of state party Chairman William Nungesser, the only GOP state chairman to endorse the challenger. But Bush won nonetheless. With 94% of the vote in, Bush had 62%, Buchanan 27% and Duke 9%.

Buchanan claimed credit for Duke’s loss, but a more significant factor may have been voter registration. Duke drew a majority of white votes in the state last year when he ran for governor, but much of his support came from among the state’s 1.6 million Democrats and from independents.

In Louisiana’s presidential primary, only the state’s 400,000 registered Republicans may vote, and that group generally has not been supportive of Duke, expressing concerns about his past klan and neo-Nazi affiliations.

“We certainly didn’t get the votes,” Duke conceded to reporters. But, he added, “this is my night because other candidates are talking about my issues all over the country.”

FLORIDA, TEXAS--By contrast to Mississippi and Louisiana, where Bush and Buchanan ran hard-fought campaigns both on the ground and over the airwaves, the two largest states voting Tuesday saw hardly any GOP campaign at all.

In Florida, Bush lost a substantial share of the vote. With 92% of the ballots counted in the state, Bush led Buchanan 69% to 31%. Duke was not on Florida’s ballot.

The President did better in Texas. With 76% of the vote counted, he had 70% to Buchanan’s 24%. Duke tallied a paltry 3%.

In all, 97 delegates were at stake in Florida, and 121 were up for grabs in Texas.

Buchanan did not campaign at all in Florida over the past week, although he did visit the state shortly after the New Hampshire vote. Bush, feeling no pressure, stayed out of the state as well. Neither candidate spent the huge sums necessary to air advertisements in Florida’s expensive television markets.

Political analysts in the state said Cuban-Americans, a large and conservative voting bloc in the state, had been turned off by Buchanan’s frequent criticisms of immigration and by his isolationist foreign policy.

In any case, Bush has deep roots in Republican politics in the state, where his son, Jeb, who also served as his state campaign manager, has long been politically active.

Bush’s roots go even deeper in Texas, the state where he maintains his legal residence.

Buchanan made one appearance in the state and aired TV advertisements in a few markets. But he largely conceded the territory to Bush and the enormous network he has built up over years in Texas politics, dating back to his service as a young congressman representing an affluent section of Houston in the 1960s.

NEW ENGLAND--Bush has strong New England roots--his father served as a U.S. senator from Connecticut and sent his son to school in Massachusetts, but the poor economy that damaged the President with New Hampshire voters also worked against him in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

With 87% of the Massachusetts vote counted, Bush led Buchanan, 66% to 28%. In Rhode Island, with 100% of the vote counted, Bush led, 63% to 32%. In each state, Duke received 2% of the vote. Massachusetts sends 38 delegates to the GOP convention; Rhode Island sends 15.

Buchanan had hoped for a larger vote in both states, but the inability of his thinly staffed campaign to manage the logistics of a multistate race clearly hurt him. Over the weekend, problems with his campaign plane in Mississippi delayed him nearly a full day from flying to New England for rallies, leaving him addressing crowds of protesters rather than supporters.

TENNESSEE, OKLAHOMA--The two border states of the day drew relatively little attention although Bush and Buchanan each campaigned in Oklahoma briefly.

With 98% of the vote counted in that state, Bush led Buchanan, 70% to 27%. Duke had 3%. Oklahoma has 34 delegates.

With 99% of the vote counted in Tennessee, which has 45 delegates, Bush led, 73% to 22%, with Duke at 3%. Unlike the Democrats, who distribute delegates to each candidate in proportion to the percentage of the vote won, the Republicans generally employ a “winner-take-all” system. Because of that, Bush has collected nearly all the delegates in the contests leading up to Tuesday’s votes.

“For all practical purposes, he has won the nomination,” Fitzwater declared, adding that it was “very difficult to see any scenario” under which Bush would be denied the nomination.

Campaign manager Fred V. Malek said: “With these decisive victories, the primaries become less relevant.”

Bush made only a passing reference to the voting, telling his audience at a White House dinner for the United Negro College Fund: “You’ll forgive me if we’re a little nervous. It’s a big election night out there. So if you see little slips of paper coming in, forget them.”

Buchanan, however, clearly had his eyes on a different prize. “I know what the returns are saying tonight, my friends,” he said at his Michigan rally.

But he proclaimed that his 14-week-old campaign had already “torn away one-third of the Republican Party from the national Establishment for good.”

Vowing to continue his campaign to hold Bush’s “feet to the fire,” Buchanan outlined a conservative manifesto. “We’ve got to roll back the stone of government,” he said. “We’ve got to cut taxes. We’ve got to cut spending. We’ve got to put America back up on Freedom Road.”

And he borrowed from the poet Robert Frost to vow: “We’ve got miles to go before we sleep.”

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl in Detroit and James Gerstenzang, Thomas B. Rosenstiel and Marilyn Yaquinto in Washington contributed to this story.

Delegate Tally

The delegate count in all contests to date, according to the Associated Press. DEMOCRATS / 2,145 needed for nomination. Delegates Bill Clinton: 693 Paul E. Tsongas: 345 Jerry Brown: 79 REPUBLICANS / 1,105 need for nomination. Delegates George Bush: 554 Patrick J. Buchanan: 51 David Duke: 1