Forbes Bounces Back With a Convincing Victory in Arizona

Publishing magnate Steve Forbes, counted out of the Republican presidential race only a week ago, bounded back Tuesday with a convincing win in the Arizona primary as the already unusual nomination contest took another sudden swerve.

Sen. Bob Dole won two lesser primaries in his familiar prairie backyard of North Dakota and South Dakota. Patrick J. Buchanan, who campaigned more vigorously than anyone in Arizona, sustained the biggest disappointment of the day, losing to Forbes there and failing to measurably expand his hard-core share of the GOP vote.

With 75% of the vote counted in Arizona, Forbes had 34%. Dole and Buchanan had 29% and 28%, respectively. Lamar Alexander lagged far behind with 7%.

Arizona was the most fiercely contested race of the day. As the winner, Forbes claimed all 39 of the state’s delegates and moved into the overall delegate lead. Perhaps just as important, the results will encourage him to open his expansive checkbook and invest heavily in the next round of contests--particularly in New York, where he and Dole are the only candidates on the ballot in all of the state’s districts.

“Our campaign in New York will be very substantial. It will be impressive,” said Forbes campaign manager William Dal Col. “We are going to take Sen. Dole head on. Our message--the politics of the future against the politics of the past.”

Dole’s twin victories in the Dakotas were his first primary wins in 1996, having previously won only the Iowa caucuses. But he alone mounted serious campaigns in the Dakotas, and as a result the outcome there was overshadowed by Arizona, re-fueling doubts about his ability to fight off challenges from all sides at once.

With 98% of the North Dakota returns in, Dole won 42%, with Forbes at 20%, Buchanan at 18%, and Alexander at 6%. In South Dakota, Dole won 45%, with Buchanan at 29%, Forbes at 13% and Alexander at 9%, with 100% of the returns in.

“We lost the early battles. But we didn’t give up. We got up off the mat and went back to work,” Forbes declared in a victory statement. “Sen. Dole--the invincible front-runner--has lost three key states in a row: New Hampshire, Delaware and Arizona. The politicians are gone. An historic presidential campaign is about to unfold. Now the race has come down to a contest between two competing visions of American offered by two citizen candidates,” referring to himself and Buchanan.

Dole, for his part, tried to put a good face on the results. “We won two out of three. . . . We’re back in the winning column,” Dole said at Washington’s National Airport after arriving back in the capital from a partial day of campaigning in South Carolina.

“Forbes spent $4 million. That’s what happened” in Arizona, Dole said.

‘Country Is on Fire’

Buchanan, who had campaigned heavily in Arizona and counted on a upwelling of support there, admitted that “obviously we are disappointed.” A win in Arizona would have aided him significantly in Saturday’s battle with Dole in South Carolina.

Earlier in the evening, at a rally in Marietta, Ga., where he was joined on the platform by the state’s former arch-segregationist governor, Lester Maddox, Buchanan appeared to think he was on course for a better finish. “They are going wild up there in Washington now . . . this country is on fire,” he declared.

Indeed, CNN, CBS, ABC and the Associated Press had all declared, based on exit poll returns, that he and Forbes were battling for the lead with Dole in third--a projection they later had to back away from.

“I’m simply an instrument for a great political movement in America,” he told supporters.

In Arizona, an exit poll done cooperatively for the four major television networks and the Associated Press showed that Forbes successfully appealed to those with family incomes over $100,000, those who made up their minds in the last day, and those who voted for independent Ross Perot for president in 1992.

His steady and richly endowed drumrolls for a flat tax to replace the progressive income tax clearly paid him benefits: “Taxes” was the issue most often cited by voters as the most important in the race. Among the roughly a quarter of voters who cited that concern, Forbes won two-thirds of the votes. He also appeared to be a protest candidate of sorts: Better than a third of those who said they wanted other candidates to enter the race voted for Forbes.

Buchanan Support

Buchanan’s support was similar to that seen in other early primary states. He won over those with less education--high school graduates and people with some college experience--as well as the “very conservative” voters and those who felt two of Buchanan’s hottest issues--immigration and abortion--were the most important. Roughly 1 in 10 voters chose each of those two issues.

But Buchanan’s showing was not entirely positive. More than half of the electorate in Arizona, and similar numbers in North and South Dakota, said they felt Buchanan was “too extreme.” That was a victory for Dole’s major post-New Hampshire thrust that the fight was between the “mainstream and the extreme.”

The difference in the results appeared to be the options that voters had. In Arizona, those who thought Buchanan was too extreme split between Dole and Forbes. In the Dakotas, where Forbes was a far less visible presence, those voters went overwhelmingly to Dole.

The presence of Forbes in the race hurt Dole in myriad ways. Dole, for example, pulled better than a third of the substantial over-60 population in Arizona, but Forbes also cut into that natural Dole constituency by attracting 3 of 10 older voters.

Self-described moderates, who would have been expected to gravitate to Dole if it had been a two-man race with Buchanan, also went to Forbes by a 4-3 margin.

Although the race in Arizona was important on its own, it served to re-arrange the all important momentum quotient as the campaign now heads to the Old South, bedrock of Republican support.

Forbes not so very long ago slipped in the first round of voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. But in Arizona, he tried to learn from some tactical mistakes and focused on tapping into electoral discontent with an assault aimed against Washington and America’s progressive but now-ponderous tax code, one of the cornerstones of national policy since 1913.

A self-financing multimillionaire publishing scion, Forbes repeated Tuesday night that he was prepared to spend however much was necessary to win the nomination. “I have a number in mind, but I’m not going to share it with my opponents,” he said in an interview broadcast on CNN. In Arizona, he outspent the others combined.

For Dole, who has been seeking national office for 20 years, there was--and remains--no option except to win. His strategy of outlasting his foes has thus far been nerve-racking and costly; his attempts to straddle the middle, painful.

Dole’s campaign in Arizona did not match his rivals’ in intensity, a recognition in part of the anti-establishment tradition that runs so deeply in this state. Dole also chose not to attend a televised debate with the other leading candidates. In recognition of that mistake, Dole said Tuesday that he would attend a scheduled candidate debate in South Carolina on Thursday.

“It’s my view that I’ll be the Republican nominee,” Dole said Tuesday. “It may take a bit longer than we planned.”

As the pace of primaries accelerated to warp speed, Buchanan and Dole moved onward to the South. Forbes lingered into the night in Arizona before joining the rush.

Party Divided

While Tuesday’s results were a setback for Buchanan, his rebellion against the GOP status quo already has opened a divide in the party wider and more serious than any in more than a generation.

And surely no candidate has come close to Buchanan this campaign for energy, controversy or sheer surprise--turning the GOP, for many in the party establishment, into the G-U-L-P.

Feeding off his victory in New Hampshire and a party that suddenly took him seriously, if sometimes only as a threat, Buchanan had careened across Arizona for days, covering 1,500 miles in a bus caravan, clad often in a black cowboy hat.

He leveled most of his firepower on Dole, a move that ultimately left some aides worried that they had missed an opportunity to take a notch or two out of Forbes’ seeming surge. Most of his advertising was not directed at his opponents, and his speeches took umbrage at Dole but barely mentioned Forbes.

Four years ago, Buchanan ran chiefly as a protest candidate. But this time around, his supporters made plain they were supporting him for president, not protest.

Forbes campaigned in Arizona all election day, devoting much of the day to appearances on radio and television interviews. This supplemented an estimated $4 million he spent on broadcast advertising, making Forbes one of the best-known faces in the state.

“When people hear my message I gain support. Our message has gotten across better in Arizona than in Iowa or New Hampshire. We have the momentum here,” he enthused, adding that “I’m in it for the duration.”

After hammering Dole for weeks, Forbes enlarged his field of attack to include Buchanan. “I think it boils down to competing visions,” he said.

“People will realize that one candidate represents the policy of the past, another represents a vision of America turning inward, and they are going to turn to me.”

As with Buchanan’s backers, those supporting Forbes were serious about their candidate.

Dillard E. Brown, a retired 72-year-old Arizona metal worker and “lifelong Democrat who puts my country above politics,” was among the converts.

“Steve Forbes amounts to an extraordinary opportunity that comes around once in a lifetime--at least my lifetime,” said Brown, who stood out in the crowd with his cowboy boots, jeans, Western-style shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons and a massive blue opal bolo tie.

“Absolutely I’m gonna vote for him because he’s got the brains and willpower to bring common sense back to government--and he’s doin’ it for the people, not the money,” he said.

Dole began his day on Capitol Hill as Congress reconvened, and then flew to Charleston, S.C. He declared his determination to win the primary there--the first vote in the South, a bedrock of Republicanism. “I’ll not come in second in South Carolina,” he vowed.

Alexander spent Tuesday a nation away from Arizona, castigating Buchanan’s protectionist trade policies and Dole’s message.

“We need to find out now--not next fall--if Bob Dole has a vision for the future,” the former Tennessee governor told a rally in Boston.

Among the candidates in the back of the pack, Alan Keyes took 3% in both North and South Dakota and 1% in Arizona. Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) took 1% in North Dakota and Arizona and was not on the ballot in South Dakota. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove) received less than 1% of the vote in Arizona and was not on the ballot in the other two states.

Sahagun reported from Arizona and Decker from Los Angeles. Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Stephen Braun in Marietta, Ga., Marc Lacey in Charleston, S.C., Edwin Chen in Boston and John Balzar in Los Angeles.