Republicans Struggle to Retain Control of the Senate

At least one incumbent senator, Republican Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire, appeared headed for defeat Tuesday as the GOP struggled to retain control of the upper house, which it took over in 1994.

Early returns showed that Smith would likely be turned out of office by former Rep. Dick Swett, a Democrat who had lost his House seat in the GOP sweep two years ago.

Otherwise, incumbents fared well in Eastern states, where the polls had closed.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), whose 94th birthday is Dec. 5, easily escaped a challenge to his eighth term.

And in North Carolina, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, also a Republican, won his rematch with Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also was reelected.

Among Democrats facing tough challenges, John Kerry of Massachusetts apparently won his battle with Gov. William F. Weld.

In Georgia, Democrat Max Cleland narrowly defeated Republican Guy Millner for the Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Sam Nunn. The contest mirrored the presidential race in the state, where President Clinton and GOP challenger Bob Dole were running neck and neck.

The Democrats need to win three formerly Republican seats to gain control of the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority. With Clinton and Al Gore reelected as president and vice president, Gore would break ties in votes that divided 50-50.

Regardless of the ultimate partisan division, Tuesday’s results guaranteed a major shift in the look of the Senate, because 14 members are retiring. The tradition-bound Senate will be made up of less-experienced legislators who have not learned the often genteel ways of the upper house and who have reached their seats after generally rough-and-tumble campaigns.

Swett’s apparent victory in New Hampshire would give the Granite State a Democratic senator for the first time in two decades. It reflects a political shift taking place in the once staunchly Republican state.

Smith won his Senate seat six years ago with 65% of the vote, but saw his popularity slip as he moved unsuccessfully to rewrite one of the nation’s fundamental environmental programs--the “Superfund” cleanup of toxic waste sites.

In North Carolina, victorious Republican incumbent Helms prevailed and will begin serving his fifth Senate term next year. Helms had defeated Gantt by a margin of 53% to 47% six years ago in a racially tinged contest.

But the voting rolls have increased by 700,000 since then, and many of the new voters are younger people with new families who have moved into the state to take advantage of a surge in jobs. Their politics are believed to be moderate and their lifestyle suburban. Although many are thought to lean toward Republicans in general, their response to Helms’ brand of conservatism was in doubt.

Clinton steered clear of the state, allowing Gantt to generally avoid the controversy stirred up when the Food and Drug Administration began steps to regulate tobacco as a drug, a process that is widely unpopular in the tobacco-growing state.

If incumbents were running well in the races that were decided early, so were candidates in the same party as retiring incumbents.

Cleland, the former head of the Veterans Administration in the Jimmy Carter administration who lost both legs and one arm in Vietnam, provided one case in point by winning his race to replace Nunn.

Another was found in New Jersey, where midday exit polls indicated Democratic Rep. Robert G. Torricelli was likely to defeat Republican Rep. Dick Zimmer for the seat from which Democrat Bill Bradley had retired. The New Jersey race--angry, negative and expensive--had appeared much closer in final public opinion polls over the weekend than the exit polls seemed to indicate.

Clinton made three visits to the state to boost Torricelli--and his own chances in the traditionally fickle state--as they sought to keep a seat crucial to their party’s hope of regaining the Senate majority. And Zimmer was at Dole’s side as the Republican presidential candidate campaigned at a highway diner at 4 a.m. Saturday.

At least $16 million was reported to have been spent through Oct. 20 on the Senate race in a state that has no statewide commercial television station, forcing candidates to advertise in the expensive New York and Philadelphia media markets.

The result of the nationwide vote should make the Senate, historically less subject to popular trends and political pressures than the House, even less likely to swing to extremes.

Should the Republicans maintain their majority, said Mike Casey, a former Democratic official, they will be “a chastened majority.”

“Tonight, the Republican revolution ends,” he said. “If they keep the House and Senate or just one body, their near-death experience this election cycle can only be attributed to the extreme actions they took these past two years. Moderation will be the order of the day these next two years.”

With no overriding issues unifying the party’s Senate races from state to state, individual concerns took on prime importance. In Colorado, the environment, federal spending and a woman’s right to choose an abortion dominated a bruising Senate race between three-term Republican Rep. Wayne Allard and Democratic newcomer Tom Strickland.

Allard, 52, painted Strickland, a politically well-connected attorney for the state’s most prominent law firm, as a lobbyist for special interests and a hypocrite for claiming to be an environmentalist.

In television ads and in debates, Allard attacked Strickland for representing a logging and woodcutting firm, as well as an incinerator company that had tried to locate a plant in a poor section of north Denver.

Strickland, 44, who got endorsements from every environmental group in the country, pointed out that Allard’s voting record earned him a place on the League of Conservation Voters’ “dirty dozen” list of members of Congress targeted for defeat.

Times staff writers Sam Fulwood III in Charlotte, N.C., Eric Harrison in Atlanta, Elizabeth Mehren in Boston and Louis Sahagun in Denver contributed to this story.