Dole Leading in 8 States as He Takes Charge of GOP Race

Sen. Bob Dole reached out to tighten his grasp on the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday as early election returns showed him winning Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and Maryland and with a strong lead in Georgia, Colorado and Rhode Island.

In Washington, House Speaker Newt Gingrich pronounced the tumultuous but short race concluded. “I think it’s over; I think he’s the nominee,” Gingrich said.

Dole himself was only slightly less self-assured. “We’ve found a leader to bring the Republican Party together,” Dole said, referring to himself. “Pretty soon we’re going to unite to achieve one purpose and that’s to defeat Bill Clinton,” he said at a victory party in Washington, D.C.

A week ago, the GOP race was a nasty, mud-slinging and inconclusive battle with Dole, Patrick J. Buchanan and business heir Steve Forbes all having won a contest, but none of them able to break free. But now, while Dole may not formally clinch the nomination before California’s primary on March 26, his solid win in South Carolina last Saturday combined with the victories in Tuesday’s voting will give him a commanding lead.

Early in the evening, Buchanan, who had hoped for an upset in Georgia, acknowledged as much. “It’s an uphill battle everywhere,” Buchanan told supporters in Buffalo, N.Y.

Buchanan appeared to be coming in second to Dole in most states, but far behind, except in Georgia. As for Forbes, he had talked hopefully earlier this week about an upset in Connecticut, but when the results came in, he was losing to Dole by better than 2 to 1.

In total, 259 delegates were at stake in 10 states Tuesday, slightly more than one-quarter of those needed to wrap up the nomination. Based on the early returns, Dole seems likely to win the lion’s share. Eight states, including five in New England, held primaries and two conducted caucuses.

As the results trickled in, Buchanan quickly declared he was staying in the contest no matter what. “We’re going to go through all these primaries and give every American a chance to vote for these ideas,” he said.

Others, however, may not do so. Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander, who had conceded on Monday that his chances of a victory Tuesday were slim, plans to meet with advisors to discuss whether his promised strategy of waging one final effort next week in Florida still makes sense. Alexander appeared to be running no better than fourth in any of the night’s contests, barely rising above 10% of the vote anywhere.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, already a footnote in this race, sized up the results and prepared to withdraw. Vermont was the senator’s last stand, and it was the first state of the evening to fall into Dole’s column. With roughly half of the state’s vote counted, Lugar had won only 13% of the vote.

Expectations ran sky high for Dole all during the day--both tantalizingly and precariously so. His rebound to front-runner standing since Saturday’s victory in South Carolina cut deeply into the prospects and spirits of his opponents. Likewise, his own campaign brimmed over with fresh energy.

But Dole still needed to overwhelm the field in Tuesday’s voting--and again Thursday in New York, where Forbes is his main competition--before cementing his own inevitability.

In this year’s hyper-compressed presidential nominating sequence, no single day has yet come close to matching this latest round of voting--either in its mix of geography, riches of delegates or chess-game complexity. For the first time, small-state retail politics yielded to a broad, wholesale contest.

To the challenge, Dole brought not only momentum but unmatched campaign experience, a well-tended organization and widespread establishment backing.

Dole’s foes, instead of trying to win the nomination for themselves, were left to seek a lesser goal--hoping to bring the Senate leader down a notch or two, or maybe more, and thus raise anew the familiar doubts about whether Dole was too much the insider, too battle scarred and compromised, to make the case against Bill Clinton.

Even as they cast votes for him Tuesday, some of Dole’s supporters continued to express these very doubts.

“We ain’t got much,” said Columbus, Ga., voter Harold Dudley about his choices. The 75-year-old retired federal worker voted for Dole, but said: “I don’t think he’s going to win [in November]. Clinton’s going to make him look bad in any debate. But everybody else is kind of a radical.”

Before Tuesday’s balloting, the nominating race already had moved full-swing toward Thursday’s primary in New York--the first of the huge states to have its say this campaign.

Speaking to a bipartisan audience in a state where GOP politics is generally moderate, Dole for the second time in two days backed further away from his support for a national flat tax to replace the progressive income tax. In this case, Dole suggested that he might favor a higher tax rate on the more affluent.

“We’re looking at a single rate concept with flexibility,” Dole explained to the Assn. for a Better New York in Manhattan. “Maybe there will have to be a second bracket for the upper incomes.”

For weeks, Dole has equivocated on whether he could support a system that would tax all income at a flat rate--the heart of all Republican tax-reform plans, including the ones proposed by Forbes, Buchanan and a Republican commission chaired by Jack Kemp, the former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

A day earlier, Dole added a different, but also important, qualification to his support for a flat tax--saying he would allow continued deductions for state and local taxes. That would be in addition to deductions for home mortgages and charity donations, which Dole has consistently supported.

Dole castigated Clinton for vetoing GOP proposals to turn over welfare and Medicaid to state administration. But at the same time, Dole seemed to acknowledge the reservations many have expressed. “If it doesn’t work, Congress meets every year . . . and we can change it,” Dole said.

“The last thing Bob Dole will ever do is take it away from poor people,” he added.

Buchanan spent much of his Tuesday in a final scramble for votes in Georgia, making light of his diminished prospects. While getting his hair cut at a mall in Columbus, the one-time newsman quipped about the headlines to come: “Buchanan gets trimmed in Georgia--I can see it.”

His campaign day began well before dawn, appearing on a morning show at a local television station in Columbus, Ga., and then returning to his Holiday Inn hotel room for 20 back-to-back interviews on live talk radio shows.

“Georgia is a crucial primary in this whole race,” Buchanan said on WJLA in Ellijay, Ga. “It’s going to decide if the Republican Party nominates a genuine, authentic fighting conservative in Pat Buchanan or whether it goes back to the Beltway politics of Bob Dole . . . Bob Dole belongs in Congress.”

Later, as he moved on to Buffalo, Buchanan’s mood turned more somber. But not his fight, as he began talking about August’s GOP National Convention in California. “We’re going all the way to San Diego to do battle for our beliefs and our convictions,” he said.

Buchanan also repeated his complaints about what he called the unfairness of New York’s election laws. Because of the state’s strict-access rules, only Dole and Forbes will be on ballots statewide. Buchanan is on the ballot in about two-thirds of the state’s congressional districts. His New York supporters should cast protest votes for Forbes in areas where he is not on the ballot, Buchanan told an Albany-area radio audience.

Also campaigning in New York, Forbes faced a disappointment of another kind: He has long courted Kemp, the former Cabinet secretary, congressman, conservative intellectual and Buffalo Bills quarterback, in hopes of an endorsement. Forbes considers himself a protege of Kemp, and the publishing magnate launched his presidential campaign only after Kemp decided not to run.

After talking with Kemp on the phone, Forbes spent an anxious morning waiting in Buffalo. Finally, Forbes moved on empty handed. “I don’t know whether he’s going to endorse a candidate,” Forbes said.

While Forbes was campaigning in person, he also sent out letters that included appeals for low budget contributions.

For $20, a respondent was promised membership on his national steering committee “as an equal partner. . . . Whatever you can contribute will help, but it’s urgent you respond today,” said Forbes, who has relied on his personal fortune to finance almost all of his campaign to date.

Forbes offered a sweetener to contributors: “I will match your contribution dollar for dollar. Equal partners.”

Shogren reported from Georgia, Brownstein from New York. Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Bob Sipchen in New York and Cathleen Decker and John Balzar in Los Angeles.

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