THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 15, 1996 TAG: 9602150371
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MASON PETERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Republican Jesse Helms beat his first Democratic challenger for a U.S. Senate seat in 1972, and a Mason-Dixon poll this week predicted the North Carolina conservative will do it again in November to win a fifth consecutive term.
Helms holds a 49 to 37 percent lead over Democrat Harvey Gantt, the former Charlotte mayor Helms defeated in the 1990 Senate race, the political survey reported Thursday.
Six years ago, Helms beat Gantt 53 percent to 47 percent.
``Gantt seems to face an uphill battle against Helms,'' said Brad Coker, director of Mason-Dixon Media Research Inc. in Columbia, Md.
``North Carolina voters are divided along racial lines, with Helms leading 61 percent to 24 percent among whites and Gantt having an 89 percent to 2 percent advantage with blacks,'' Coker said.
In this week's Gantt-Helms poll, 14 percent of those questioned said they hadn't made a decision in the Senate race.
Helms is 74 and ``still going strong,'' according to James Broughton, one of the Republican senator's chief aides in Washington. Helms bounced back from heart surgery several years ago.
Helms first ran successfully in 1972 against a Greek-American Democrat whom he easily defeated after plastering the state with signs that said ``Vote For Helms - He's One Of Us.'' That was the year the famed Congressional Club was organized by conservative Republicans as Helms' private fund-raising political organization.
The club went on to raise more than $12 million to help Helms defeat Democratic Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. in 1984's ``dirtiest Senate fight ever.'' Hunt sat out for for eight years before he emerged from political seclusion to successfully run again for governor.
While 56 percent of the men questioned this year said they would support Helms, women in the survey were evenly divided with 42 percent backing Helms and 42 percent supporting Gantt.
Gantt, a 54-year-old nationally admired architect, will be opposed in the Democratic Senate Primary by Charlie Sanders, a wealthy pharmaceutical manufacturing executive with headquarters in the Research Triangle.
In a survey of 431 probable voters in the Democratic primary, 50 percent said they favored Ganttand 19 percent liked Sanders. Thirty-one percent of the Democrats said they were undecided.
In a Mason-Dixon matchup between Helms and Sanders, 49 percent of all voters surveyed said they would vote for Helms and 30 percent were for Sanders.
As in the most recent Senate election years, more eastern North Carolina residents favored Helms than in other areas of the state.
In the northeast, 50 percent of those questioned said they will again vote to re-elect Helms and 52 percent of voters in the southeast said the same thing. The lowest regional Helms support was in Gantt's home town of Charlotte, where only 43 percent of the voters said they would back Helms.
Sixteen percent of northeast North Carolina voters said Helms had done an ``excellent'' job as a four-term Senator - the highest ``excellent'' percentage in the six state regions where the poll was conducted for The Virginian-Pilot.
Helms' biggest statewide rating for ``excellence'' in office came in 1993 when an earlier Mason-Dixon poll gave the Republican senator 17 percent.
Helms' ``excellent'' score has averaged 10.76 percent in North Carolina since the first Mason-Dixon poll in 1986.
``Senator Helms' job rating remains generally favorable,'' said Coker.
``Statewide, 51 percent rate his performance as `excellent or good' and 26 percent rate it poor,'' the pollster added.
Forty-seven percent of those questioned in February of 1995 said they would re-elect Helms and the same percentage of respondents said the same thing this year, the poll showed.
Twenty-nine percent said they will ``definitely'' vote against Helms this year, a figure that is down from 35 percent last year, according to Coker.
For the Helms-Gantt study, Coker this month interviewed 844 registered North Carolina voters, including 491 Democrats, 280 Republicans and 73 Independents. The sampling involved 418 men, 426 women, including 171 blacks.
All of those interviewed were randomly sampled by telephone and all stated they regularly voted in state elections.
Coker said that the margin for error in the survey was plus or minus 3.4 percent and ``this means there is a 95 percent probability that the true figure would fall within that range if the entire population were sampled.'' by CNB