Buchanan Leads Dole in Tight Race; Alexander a Close Third

Republican presidential contenders Patrick J. Buchanan and Bob Dole were locked in a close race and Lamar Alexander was running close behind Tuesday night as the three battled for votes and momentum in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary.

With 81% of the vote counted at press time, Buchanan had 27%, Dole 26% and Alexander 23%.

The close results seem certain to prolong the GOP nomination battle, perhaps making California’s March 26 primary the deciding contest.

About 30 minutes after the polls closed here at 5 p.m. PST, the four major television networks declared Buchanan the winner, based on their analysis of polling of voters after they cast their ballots.

Exit polling of voters by The Times showed the race between Buchanan and Dole too close to call. These results also showed Alexander close behind.

Running a distant fourth with 12% was publishing magnate Steve Forbes, who also finished behind the top three contenders in last week’s Iowa caucuses. Earlier in his campaign, Forbes had set at least a third-place finish as his goal for New Hampshire.

Rep. Robert K. Dornan of Garden Grove, Calif., former State Department official Alan Keyes, Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar and businessman Morry Taylor rounded out the GOP field. With 81% of the vote counted, they had 0%, 3%, 6% and 1%, respectively.

Buchanan, a former television commentator, gained a boost in the week before the New Hampshire vote when he ran a strong second behind Dole in the Iowa caucuses. Stressing his message of cultural conservatism and economic populism, he called upon voters in the New Hampshire GOP primary to join him in remaking the Republican Party.

In a speech to his supporters even as the vote was being counted, Buchanan expressed his gratitude to voters “who resisted negative campaigning and nasty attack ads and smears and all that nonsense,” adding that his brand of conservatism was the one that “does not apologize” for its beliefs.

“We’re going to give voice to the voiceless,” he said. And denouncing international trade agreements and the United Nations, he declared that “we’re going to recapture the lost sovereignty of our country, we’re going to bring it home.”

Dole, meanwhile, had counted heavily on support from New Hampshire’s GOP establishment, led by popular Gov. Steve Merrill, to propel him to victory.

Alexander, the former governor of Tennessee, was offering himself as an alternative to those who disagree with Buchanan on the issues and do not believe Dole can effectively battle President Clinton in the fall.

Appearing on CNN Tuesday night as the votes were being counted, Alexander termed Dole “a loser,” arguing that Dole had no new ideas and would be incapable of beating Clinton.

Among those interviewed by The Times after they cast their ballots, Buchanan voters cited his strong convictions. Dole backers said leadership and experience were the principal reasons for their choice. Alexander voters mentioned experience and new ideas.

Alexander, who seemed to be running stronger than preelection polls indicated, was getting about one-third of those who decided on their choices over the last weekend, more than any of the other candidates.

With the exception of Forbes, who only entered the race last September, all of the contenders had campaigned in this strategic state for the better part of the year. But the vote in Iowa--in which Dole narrowly defeated Buchanan and Alexander ran a strong third--and the bitter skirmishing that followed had far more impact than anything that had happened previously.

Negativism, through attack television ads and phone calls, were the order of the day.

“Everybody complains about the negative stuff,” Dornan remarked to a reporter in the closing days of the contest. “But there’s one reason why we all use it--it works.”

Although negative campaigning often holds down turnout, early indications Tuesday were that turnout was unusually heavy. In fact, voters leaving their polling places at Webster School in Manchester said the attack ads, along with the closeness of the presidential race, had made them more determined to cast their ballots.

Banker Rebecca Tetrault, 32, said this primary filled her with the rare sense that her vote could really count. “I think in this particular election, every vote is important because it’s going to be close,” Tetrault said.

With pre-primary polls showing the contest between Dole and Buchanan a dead heat, Tetrault said she decided to vote “against” Buchanan and cast her ballot for Dole, even though she preferred Forbes.

Turned off by the negative campaigning, 49-year-old teacher Elise Hood decided to vote for a candidate the media paid little attention to: Lugar.

“Everyone else was going after each other,” said Hood, a Democrat-turned-independent. (New Hampshire rules allow unaffiliated voters to participate in primaries.)

It was the Dole campaign, with its extensive financial and organizational resources, that led the attacks during the last week.

According to GOP sources, Dole’s aides, shaken by the results in Iowa that appeared to undermine their candidate’s long-established status as front-runner, decided to pound away at their two chief rivals.

Dick Bennett, an independent pollster here, reported that on the Saturday night before the vote, nearly one-third of the 600 people his American Research Group interviewed complained about phone calls from the Dole campaign. Bennett said the calls were described as “nasty persuasion calls targeted at Buchanan and Alexander.”

Dole aides claimed that the gist of the campaign’s assault on Buchanan--that he was a divisive figure who held extreme views--was supported by the disclosure that Larry Pratt, a co-chairman of Buchanan’s presidential campaign, had appeared at meetings organized by white supremacists and right-wing militia leaders.

Pratt, director of Gun Owners of America, denied holding racist views, took a leave of absence from the campaign. And Buchanan, in a bold move that startled his rivals, used the forum of a televised campaign debate to charge that Pratt was being smeared because of his support for Buchanan.

Judging by pre-primary polls, Buchanan’s stand appeared to solidify his support. But some analysts said the initial story about Pratt, and similar allegations of his links to extremist groups that followed, prevented Buchanan from expanding his core support to reach additional numbers of middle-class voters troubled by economic insecurity.

And the polls indicated that the campaign left him with the highest negative ratings of any of the candidates. “I think Buchanan is a fanatic,” said Bob Taylor, an Exeter carpenter who was still undecided on the final weekend of the campaign.

“Too much of an extremist,” said Tom Trimarco, a lawyer from Derry.

It was a measure of the widespread lack of enthusiasm for the field of candidates that several voters interviewed as the primary neared said they were sorry that Texas Sen. Phil Gramm had dropped out of the race after Iowa--even though Gramm had never climbed above single digits in New Hampshire polls during his active candidacy.

“I really liked Phil Gramm,” said Florence Bruckner, an Exeter real estate agent. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think there are a lot of good choices left.”

This group of undecided and not firmly committed voters was a principal target for Alexander, who sought to convert them to his cause by presenting himself as a more electable version of Dole. Wherever he went on the New Hampshire campaign trail, Alexander repeated like a mantra his ABC slogan--Alexander Beats Clinton.

But Dole’s campaign quickly pointed out that this acronym also represented another combination of words--Another Bill Clinton, an effort to remind voters that Alexander, like the incumbent Democrat chief executive, was the governor of a small Southern state.

More seriously, Dole’s campaign filled the airwaves with charges that Alexander’s record as governor had been excessively liberal because he had been guilty of pushing through tax increases. And Alexander was also required to respond to charges that in his eagerness to enlarge his personal fortune after leaving public office he had breached the standards of propriety.

Some voters were attracted by Alexander’s emphasis on turning the powers of the federal government back to the states. “I think it’s important for all of us to take more responsibility for what we ask the government to do,” said Kim Roy, rooms manager at the Manchester Holiday Inn, which both Dole and Buchanan used as their base of operations during the campaign.

But she was dubious about backing him or any of the other Republican contenders in November against Clinton.

“With these candidates, it’s not so much a question of who you like as who is there to choose,” she said.

Times staff writer Gebe Martinez contributed to this story.