THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, November 1, 1994 TAG: 9411010296
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B01 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
One week from tonight, four congressional candidates will put on their climactic campaign smiles at election-result parties and wonder how long they'll wear them.
By midnight on Nov. 8, most of the votes should have been counted in the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts and two of the candidates probably will have conceded while their tearful followers mutter about revenge in 1996.
Far and away the most nail biting is expected to be in a Greenville Ramada Inn banquet room or at Wayne County Democratic Party headquarters in Goldsboro.
That's where Republican challenger Walter B. Jones Jr. and Democratic Congressman H. Martin Lancaster will watch their political lives pass before them on a dozen TV screens.
Jones, a Farmville businessman, and Lancaster, seeking his fifth term, have been waging a down-and-dirty race that has attracted national attention in the GOP struggle to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Jones-Lancaster fight remains ``mighty close to call,'' according to some observers, and even zealous party workers in the mainly Democratic district are saying that ``if Martin wins he'll know he's been in the toughest fight of his life.''
Lancaster, a stolid Goldsboro lawyer and Navy veteran, has become involved in an angry campaign with Jones in the previously placid 3rd District. Jones is the son of the late Rep. Walter B. Jones Sr., a Democrat who represented the old 1st Congressional District for 26 years.
When Democrats in the former 1st District refused to back Jones Jr., to fill out his deceased father's unexpired term, the younger Jones switched to the Republican party and ran against Lancaster this year in the 3rd District.
The old 1st and 3rd Districts were remapped in 1992 by the General Assembly under U.S. voting rights guidelines that made the new 3rd District predominantly white and the 1st District predominantly black. Jones Jr. decided to run in the new 3rd District because many former white 1st District voting enclaves that had previously supported his father were transferred to Lancaster's 3rd District.
Meanwhile, in the new 1st District, which parallels the 3rd District down the coastal plain from the Virginia border to South Carolina, the congressional campaign has lacked the partisan stress of the Lancaster-Jones fight. In terms of historical meaning, however, it is heavy with political significance.
1st District Rep. Eva M. Clayton, the Warren County Democrat who in 1992 became the first female and the first African-American to go to Congress from North Carolina since the turn of the century, will confidently await victory at the Rocky Mount Holiday Inn.
Ted Tyler, Clayton's Republican opponent in the 1st District, will watch the returns in the little Northampton County town of Rich Square, where Tyler was mayor for nine years. This is Tyler's second consecutive attempt to get elected to Congress from the 1st District.
``We're not sure where we'll be on election night,'' said Kathryn Tyler, the candidate's wife and campaign manager.
``We'll probably be back and forth between David and Lynda Johnson's restaurant or Claudine's restaurant in Rich Square,'' she said. ``That's where our friends will be.''
While the national and state Republican parties have eagerly supported the Jones' campaign in the 3rd District, ``they haven't given me a dime,'' Tyler said. Tyler, in a campaign report, said he had spent ``about $10,000 of my own money,'' and received $2,272 in contributions. In the same period, Clayton said she had received $140,558.
In the 3rd District, Lancaster reported receiving $242,565 and Jones $104,565.
Clayton easily beat Tyler in the historic 1992 congressional race in the new 1st District. But it wasn't initially easy, in spite of a new district designed to favor black candidates.
If Clayton wins again this year - and she is expected to - it will have national impact on the civil rights philosophy of legislating Congressional districts to favor minority candidates.
The U.S. Supreme Court is involved in the 1992 General Assembly legislation that created the 1st District and a similar African-American Congressional enclave in a new 12th District.
Opponents of the ``gerrymandering'' are asking the Supreme Court to overturn the legislation creating the present 1st and 3rd Districts. Several other states with similar ``minority-majority'' districts are involved in similar litigation.
KEYWORDS: CANDIDATE CONGRESSIONAL RACE
by CNB