Close Races to Decide Control of Congress

Candidates across the country prepared Monday to put their fates in the hands of the voters as campaign ’94 snarled to a frenetic, hotly competitive, close.

With the arrival of Election Day closing one of the most dramatic and bitter midterm elections in many years, several crucial races remained too close to call, including those on which control of the Senate and the House will hinge.

But on the eve of voting, candidates largely put aside the bitter, negative attack politics that have characterized races across the nation this year and, instead, appealed to voters to show up at the polls.

“The whole effort now is the turnout,” said Jeb Bush, the Republican nominee for Florida governor, in remarks echoed by candidates of both parties.

“This election will be decided by who doesn’t vote,” said Republican pollster William McInturff, who is one of a number of analysts who think that turnout will hit a record low this year, a belief fostered by the low vote in this year’s primaries.

President Clinton’s part in the turnout effort was a final cross-country push from Seattle on Sunday to Minnesota, Michigan and Delaware Monday, hitting states with some of the nation’s closest Senate races.

From an early morning speech at a community college outside Minneapolis to a downtown rally in Wilmington complete with balloons, fireworks and rock and roll, Clinton appealed to voters not to make decisions in anger and to reject Republicans who, he insisted, had tried to block action and then take advantage of the resulting frustration on the part of Americans.

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The GOP strategy toward his Administration has been to “fight ‘em every step of the way, do everything you can to derail them and, if they win anyway, say it didn’t make any difference,” Clinton declared to the crowd of several thousand in Wilmington. “They have no shame,” he said.

Earlier in the day, his voice hoarse and raspy, Clinton blistered the Republicans for what he called “malice and cynicism.” Speaking at the Minnesota rally, at the community college where Democratic Senate candidate Ann Wynia, a state legislator, teaches political science, Clinton charged that Republicans had tried to “whine and bellyache and complain and point the finger and run for cover every time it’s time to take responsibility for the future.”

Voters should “hold them accountable,” Clinton said of the GOP. “I would gladly take a simple, even standard: Hold me accountable, hold them accountable for what we said and what we did,” he said, insisting that the country’s prospects have improved during his 21 months in office.

The Republicans fired back.

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In Tennessee, GOP Senate candidate Bill Frist railed at his opponent, Democratic incumbent Sen. Jim Sasser. Frist, a heart surgeon, said on the last day of the campaign: “For the last 18 years, Bill Frist has been transplanting hearts and lungs. For the last 18 years, Jim Sasser has been transplanting your wallets and your pocketbooks to Washington, D.C.”

Democratic strategists do not pretend that Clinton will change many minds at the last minute but they hope he can fire up the party’s faithful enough to get them to the polls to vote. Both the Michigan race between Democratic Rep. Bob Carr and Republican Spencer Abraham and the Minnesota contest between Wynia and Republican Rep. Rod Grams are now near dead heats in the polls.

In Delaware, Democrat Charles Oberly is well behind Republican Sen. William V. Roth Jr. The chief aim of Clinton’s visit here, officials said, was to help Democrats in two neighboring states, the Pennsylvania contest between Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford and GOP Rep. Rick Santorum and the New Jersey contest between Democratic Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg and his Republican challenger, state legislator Chuck Haytaian.

Wilmington, Delaware’s only major city, is in the Philadelphia media market, which covers much of southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania.

“We have to win a number of very close races,” Democratic National Chairman David Wilhelm told reporters on Air Force One. But, he added, “the real story today is the extraordinary number of races that are very, very close.”

Unfortunately for the Democrats, the polls also show a large number of undecided voters in many races. Traditionally, undecided voters in the end break against incumbents--a trend that would hurt Democrats, who have more incumbents at risk.

Democratic strategists conceded that a Republican takeover of the Senate for the first time since 1986 seems increasingly likely. Barring a near-miracle of politics, Democrats said, their candidates would lose the races to replace retiring Democratic senators in Maine, Ohio, Oklahoma, Arizona and Tennessee. Also in Tennessee, the Democrats seem likely to lose an incumbent, Sasser, who, party officials said, has slipped behind Frist, a political novice.

Clinton and his allies are hoping for upsets of two Republican senators who have found themselves in tighter races than expected--Vermont’s James M. Jeffords and Washington’s Slade Gorton.

But both sides said that control of the chamber probably will depend on a handful of races that have been too close to call all along and remain so--the contests in open seat races in Minnesota and Michigan, the race between Wofford and Santorum in Pennsylvania and the bitter struggle between Democratic Sen. Charles S. Robb and Republican Oliver L. North in Virginia--as well as the battle between Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Mike Huffington (R-Santa Barbara) in California.

Barring upsets, Democrats will have to win all of those contests to keep control of the Senate, where they hold a 56-44 majority.

So perhaps it was an unconscious sign of anxiety--or perhaps only an indication of fatigue--when Clinton twice referred to Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) as the “majority leader” in his first rally of the day in Minnesota.

While Democrats hope that the President and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who accompanied him Monday, will lend energy to Democratic voters, Republicans are counting on him as well--as inspiration for a heavy turnout of anti-Clinton voters.

“Having Bill Clinton here gives us a chance to talk about the largest tax increase in history, which Bob Carr cast the key vote for,” said Michael Hudome, campaign manager for Carr’s opponent, Abraham. Hudome said that, by the time the polls close today, GOP volunteers will have made 500,000 phone calls with the message contrasting Carr’s support of Clinton to Abraham’s support of the state’s popular Republican governor, John Engler.

Some analysts, however, including some Republicans, think that the GOP may be overplaying its hand by attacking Clinton, who is of course not on the ballot. Although Clinton is deeply unpopular in some parts of the country, particularly in the South, he is not such a liability elsewhere.

A Field poll taken late last month showed that, among all California voters, for example, 41% said they would be more likely to vote for a congressional candidate who supports Clinton. Thirty-six percent said they would be more likely to back a congressional candidate who opposed Clinton.

Democrats also hope that the GOP may have overreached in some of the rhetoric from the party’s leaders--particularly House Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia.

Clinton has been denouncing Gingrich for his comment last month that Democrats are the “enemy of normal Americans.”

Sunday, Vice President Al Gore lit into Gingrich again, this time for making political use of the recent tragedy in South Carolina in which a mother was charged wih murdering her two children.

Gingrich, commenting on the case over the weekend, had said that “the mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we have to have change.”

“I think people want to change and the only way you get change is to vote Republican. That’s the message for the last three days,” Gingrich had said.

Gore, campaigning in Peoria, Ill., called Gingrich’s comments outrageous and said that in the middle of national grief over the case, “we should have a bipartisan agreement to stop stirring up hatefulness and bringing something like this into partisan politics.”

The fact that both Dole and Clinton campaigned in Minnesota on the campaign’s final day indicates both how close the contest is and why the Democrats face such trouble.

Once one of the country’s most reliable bastions of Democratic liberalism, dominated by the Democratic Farmer Labor Party built by the late Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Minnesota has seen a resurgence of Independent Republicans, as the GOP is known in the state.

The Republican advantage has grown despite bitter splits between the party’s traditional moderate base and an increasingly powerful and energetic right wing backed by fundamentalist religious groups.

Democrats had hoped that the conservative connections of Senate nominee Grams would serve to give Wynia a strong head start. Indeed, some GOP moderates in the state have refused to support Grams. But Wynia has failed to capitalize on that opening and the race to replace the incumbent, Republican Sen. Dave Durenberger, who is retiring, remains a dead heat.

Given the stakes, it is no surprise that both parties have poured enormous resources into the Minnesota campaign. “What this race is about is the balance of power in this country,” Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) said at he Wynia rally. “All the eyes of the nation are on Minnesota.”

White House officials are more sanguine about the House than the Senate, believing that the GOP will fall short in its push to gain 40 seats and take control there as well. But nervous strategists concede that they cannot be certain.

Some Democrats whose races had seemed safe now are in trouble, including Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), who, according to Chicago Democrats, has approached his reelection with remarkable complacency, considering his indictment this year on charges stemming from the House Post Office scandal.

A Republican takeover of the House “is a possibility, absolutely--sure it’s a possibility. That’s why Democrats have to turn out,” Wilhelm said.

Although turnout was up somewhat in the 1992 presidential election, the overall trend of the last generation, particularly in non-presidential years, has been steadily downward. Some experts had hoped that more liberal voter registration and absentee ballot laws enacted in recent years would reverse that trend. But despite improvements in some states, the national trend does not seem to have turned around.

The subject is most crucial to the Democrats, whose voters tend to be less educated, less wealthy and less likely to vote regularly than Republicans. This time around, Democrats fear that low morale among the party’s voters could worsen their problems and sink their candidates nationwide. Recent polls have consistently shown that the people most likely to vote favor the GOP by a considerably larger margin than do registered voters overall.

“We know the environment is tough,” said Wilhelm. “Democrats have to turn out.”

Flying from Minnesota to Michigan, Clinton talked with leaders of Latino groups in a conference call to urge them to help achieve a large turnout, which could be crucial in several states, particularly in the close governor’s race in Texas and the multimillion-dollar Senate and gubernatorial campaigns in California.

Over the weekend, Clinton also was interviewed by radio stations oriented toward blacks. In one of the interviews, which were broadcast Monday, he accused the Republicans of putting forward the “most right-wing” group of candidates he had ever seen and warned black voters that congressional victories for the GOP would endanger their interests.

Democrats are also counting on a major effort from the AFL-CIO, which has sent out 4.5 million of pieces of “persuasion literature” since Labor Day.

State labor federations have sent out another 5 million pieces of mail, union officials said, and are running both telephone boiler-room operations and old-fashioned door-to-door canvassing. Those efforts are more efficient than ever, union officials said, because computers are now used to group addresses into convenient sequences.

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The closest thing the Republicans have to match the labor effort is the ostensibly nonpartisan Christian Coalition organized by the Rev. Pat Robertson, which set out this year to reverse the tendency of religious conservatives to stay home for off-year elections.

The coalition claims that it will distribute 33 million voter guides covering each Senate and gubernatorial race and 350 House races and phone 2 million homes. Most of the voter guides were handed out at 60,000 churches on the last Sunday before the election.

The coalition does not officially endorse candidates or parties, which would jeopardize its tax-exempt status. But its voter guides featuring candidates’ views on issues such as gun control, abortion, school vouchers and term limits strongly favor conservatives, most of them Republicans.

More Election News

* The TimesLink online service includes a large selection of other recent articles about the top national races in its Elections ’94 section. Jump: Elections.

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