3 Battle for Lead in Arizona Race; Dole Wins in Dakotas

In tri-state primaries Tuesday, Sen. Bob Dole won in the familiar prairie territory of North Dakota and South Dakota, but the more important race for the Republican nomination--Arizona--was shaping up as a three-way battle among Dole, Patrick J. Buchanan and Steve Forbes.

With 91% of the vote counted in North Dakota, Dole had 41%, Forbes 19%, Buchanan 19%, and Lamar Alexander 6%. In South Dakota, with 80% of the vote counted, Dole had 46%, Buchanan 28%, Forbes 12% and Alexander 9%.

Dole will win 20 of the 36 delegates at stake in the two states.

But in Arizona, the first primary in the West, 39 delegates all go to the winner, making it a fiercely contested election. The victor there will emerge as the delegate leader in the race and, perhaps more important, will gain important momentum for the rush of a dozen states voting in the next 10 days.

The Dakotas provided Dole with his first primary election victories and his first good news since his caucus win in Iowa.

In a year that was supposed to be all his, however, a loss by Dole in Arizona would surely overshadow the rest of the evening and refuel doubts about his ability to fight off challenges from all sides at once.

The Associated Press and television networks, relying on an exit poll of voters, projected Dole would finish third in Arizona--with Buchanan and Forbes vying for first.

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

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

Buchanan and Forbes both stood to gain more than lose with strong showings in Arizona, a state almost synonymous with rock-rib Republicanism. Former Tennessee Gov. Alexander had left the state largely to the other candidates, preferring to spend his sparse campaign cash elsewhere.

“After today, there’s no more Dole inevitability. There is no more front-runner in our race,” Alexander said on arriving in Knoxville, Tenn., after a day of campaigning in New England.

For former television commentator Buchanan, the Arizona primary offered a chance to transform his brush fire into a fire storm. Already he has taken command of the GOP debate, leaving the much-ballyhooed 1994 “contract with America” to gather dust on Capitol Hill and raising instead an angry, exuberant populist outcry in the far corners of the nation.

“I’m simply an instrument for a great political movement in America,” he told supporters at a Tuesday night rally in Marietta, Ga.

As much as anything, Buchanan’s rebellion has been aimed at the GOP status quo. And the divide opened in the party has not been so wide or so serious 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.

For Forbes, the flip side of Buchanan in so many ways, Arizona served as a chance to rebound. The man of the moment not so very long ago, he slipped in the first round of voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. In Arizona, he continued to try tapping into electoral discontent with a campaign 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 appears to have reached out to voters previously aligned with independent candidate and fellow business tycoon Ross Perot. Forbes outspent all other candidates combined in Arizona.

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 Barry Goldwater state. Dole also chose not to attend a televised debate with the other leading candidates, a snub to a state where Republicans were anxious for their first-ever GOP primary to be taken seriously. Perhaps 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 Saturday’s vote in South Carolina and a string of 24 more primaries and caucuses in the next four weeks. Forbes lingered into the night in Arizona before joining the rush.

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 in a bus caravan, clad often in a black cowboy hat. He covered 1,500 miles in search of a Western win.

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. In Arizona, most of Buchanan’s advertising was not directed at his opponents, and his speeches took umbrage at Dole but barely mentioned Forbes.

Even Tuesday morning, Buchanan was unable to resist a slam at Dole. The Senate majority leader, Buchanan said, “doesn’t have a vision and he doesn’t have an agenda.”

“Sen. Dole is running on the fact that he is inevitable, he’s going to be the nominee and everybody better get aboard, because I’m the natural leader, I’m the heir to the nomination. If he loses that argument, what is the argument for Sen. Dole?”

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.

Bill McClain, 69, was panting heavily after yelling “Go Pat Go!” for 10 minutes at a rally in Sierra Vista, south of Phoenix.

“We gotta take the country back,” said McClain, wearing a windbreaker bearing the insignia of the St Paul, the heavy cruiser on which he served in World War II’s Pacific theater. “It’s America first, that’s what we need. This immigration is taking over. That’s got to stop.”

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.

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

* RELATED STORY: A5

* FOREIGN TALENT: Buchanan’s proposed curbs on immigration could devastate some high-tech firms. D2