Elections: Doubling Up On Duke

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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.