But the outcome was something less than a decisive moral referendum on the ex-Klansman and neo-Nazi turned Republican. Black voters, appalled by the specter of a Duke administration, came to the polls in greater numbers than whites for the first time in state history. Still, Edwards won because white suburbanites voted their pocketbooks. Middle- and upper-income supporters of incumbent Gov. Buddy Roemer concluded that the stigma of Duke’s election would bring economic disaster to the state–especially its $2.3 billion-a-year tourist industry. Business leaders hammered that message home in the campaign’s final days with television spots, mailings and telephone calls warning that Duke would drive badly needed jobs from the state. Reform-minded Roemer conservatives reluctantly threw in with the liberal Edwards, whose previous administrations were stained by corruption. “The political and economic power of the state mobilized against Duke,” says New Orleans political consultant Ron Foucheux. “The last week, he was standing out there all by himself.”
Even in defeat, Duke gained a strong new national platform for his adroitly packaged appeals to white racism and economic resentment. “The candidate may have lost, but the message goes out across Louisiana and across this whole country,” Duke declared in an early-evening concession speech. He emerges with assets any ambitious politician would covet. The Wirthlin Group, a Republican polling firm, found that he is better known than any of the six announced Democratic candidates for president. He now has a fund-raising base of 20,000-plus contributors stretching across 49 states. That gives him the wherewithal to remain alive politically–possibly for a run in selected Republican presidential primaries next year.
Duke’s campaign turned Louisiana into a breeder reactor for racial anger and paranoia. Beth Rickey, a state Republican committeewoman and outspoken Duke foe, reported receiving death threats. Lisa Fuller, the wife of an LSU football player, charged that she was taunted by a white man who warned, “After Duke is elected you will get what you deserve.” Kurt Gitter, a prominent eye surgeon, wrote to the 7,000 patients on his mailing list that his grandparents and four uncles “were slaughtered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, a catastrophic event which Mr. Duke dares to question as valid.” Duke voters remained resolute that they were not racists. “To me, there’s a difference between a lazy nigger and a nigger who’s interested in doing something with himself,” says Don McCoy, a construction worker in Metairie.
The extraordinary black turnout–an estimated 80 percent of the registered vote–helped mute those voices. A thousand volunteers from the Southern Organization for United Leadership (SOUL), the state’s largest black political group, fanned out across New Orleans black neighborhoods Saturday, knocking on doors and urging those who were registered to vote. Edwards himself lay low in his New Orleans base, keeping his face out of a massive television campaign and allowing surrogates to bash Duke for his Nazi past.
Duke tried to close the gap with eleventh-hour attacks on Edwards. New ads excerpted a 1983 “60 Minutes” segment in which Edwards talked about giving state jobs to contributors. CBS said use of the tape was unauthorized and out of context. Duke also barnstormed the state, vying for Edwards’s Cajun vote in the southwest and shoring up his own strength among conservative Protestants in the north.
Duke was damaged by mounting doubts about his alleged Christian conversion. Bob Hawks, a top campaign operative, resigned last week, charging that Duke’s piety was a sham. Hawks said he decided Duke was a phony after a caller to a Christian radio station asked him what church he attended. “I saw for about 20 seconds a total blank on his face,” Hawks told NEWSWEEK, adding that he never saw Duke pray or talk about the Bible unless he was on the stump. At an Aug. 31 parade in Morgan City, he heard Duke curse young blacks who threw mud at his car. “‘Those niggers went crazy’,” Hawks remembered Duke saying.
Duke was clearly weakened last week, but his defeat was no death blow. He fattened his base of support, adding to the 600,000 votes he garnered in his 1990 race against Democratic Sen. Bennett Johnston. It means that a presidential candidacy could be an irritant to George Bush. Duke’s early targets of opportunity are easy to spot. Several Super Tuesday primary states allow Democrats to cross over and vote with the GOP. That makes Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas fertile ground for Duke’s blend of traditional populism and thinly veiled racial attacks on blacks who benefit from welfare, affirmative action and other public programs. Such a gambit would only add to Bush’s troubles on the right: conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan is preparing to run against Bush (box). While voters may continue to reject Duke by big majorities, analysts say his message has set an agenda that other candidates can ignore only at their peril. “He put issues on the table that Bush and the Democrats have to deal with,” says Democratic pollster Harrison Hickman.
Bush can look forward to being Duked by the Democrats as well. Presidential hopefuls are already trying to make Duke the Banquo’s Ghost of the 1992 campaign. They charge that Bush’s racially divisive appeals to white anxieties in 1988–personified by Willie Horton–set the stage for the white supremacist’s more explicit message. Last week former senator Paul Tsongas dubbed Duke “the son of George Bush.” Many strategists are convinced that Duke will force the GOP to withdraw the “race card.” “Duke blows another Willie Horton gambit out–entirely,” says Frank Greer, consultant to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Others caution that Democrats won’t get the kind of boost from Duke that the GOP once received from George Wallace. His race-laden appeals to alienated whites helped break up the Democratic presidential coalition in the 1960s and early ’70s. But Duke could be limited by his extremist history, as he was last week. “There aren’t a lot of places in this country where a candidate with his Nazi past is going to strike a chord,” says Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg.
Edwards’s victory caps the resurrection of a career left for dead in the 1980s after two corruption trials and a slew of grandjury investigations. Foes have promised an immediate-recall campaign, but the required 740,000 certified signatures make it unlikely. He inherits a state with a stupendous political and social hangover. “After this, how can a black person walk down the street and encounter a white person without thinking, ‘Is that a Duke person or not?”’ asks Rickey. After last week, the question for all Louisianians–and Americans–is how a smooth-talking fugitive from the American racist fringe was able to venture so far down the path to power.
