Elections: Doubling Up On Duke

Talk about bipartisanship. Until two days before the election, Ben Bagert was the Republican Party's official nominee to run for the Louisiana Senate seat held by three-term Democratic incumbent J. Bennett Johnston Jr. But state representative and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was also in the primary race as a Republican, running a campaign that played on white resentment over affirmative action and welfare. Though polls gave Johnston about half the vote in the Oct. 6 primary, they also showed Bagert, a state senator, badly trailing Duke. That opened up the possibility of a Nov. 6 runoff between the two front runners. The prospect of the former Klansman becoming the G.O.P.'s standard-bearer made state and national party leaders so unhappy that eight Republican Senators declared their support for Johnston. Then Bagert made the ultimate sacrifice: he withdrew from the race. The bipartisan blocking maneuver seemed to be paying off. Early returns gave Johnston 56% of the vote, enough to win the election outright.