(5 of 10)
On the other side of the chamber, Republicans consider safe six of the ten seats they are defending: those of Minority Leader Hugh Scott in Pennsylvania, Roman Hruska in Nebraska, Ted Stevens in Alaska, Hiram Fong in Hawaii, Paul Fannin in Arizona, and the Delaware seat of retiring Senator John Williams, which Representative William Roth is expected to win.
Since Democratic victories seem reasonably certain in Maryland and Wyoming, there remain 15 battleground states where the struggle for control of the Senate will be decided. Of that number, from the sheer force of the personalities involved, the intensity of the bloodletting, and the unpredictability of the outcome, the following seven are the races attracting the most interest and the greatest expenditure of energy and cash:
TENNESSEE. If any Senator comes close to being as nettlesome to the Administration as Arkansas' Fulbright, it is Tennessee's white-thatched, three-term Democratic Senator Albert Gore. A year ago, Spiro Agnew told gleeful Tennessee Republicans he would be back to help ensure Gore's defeat. It seemed an easy enough task. Gore was hampered by a very liberal voting record; prolonged absences from the state; a dovish stance on the war; close ties to Fulbright, Ted Kennedy and Indiana's Birch Bayh, the architect of the Haynsworth and Carswell vetoes. Thus Gore seemed to have set the stage for his own defeat.
To finish him off, Nixon chose a clean-cut, young (39) heir to a candymaking fortune, Bill Brock. A three-term Republican Congressman, Brock won 75% of the G.O.P. primary vote over Country Singer Tex Ritter, while Gore, 62, barely turned back a political novice in his own primary, winning only 51% of the vote. The low-keyed Brock, well-organized and generously financed, needles Gore as "the third Senator from Massachusetts" for raising campaign funds at a Kennedy cocktail party in Virginia, and for a "cut-and-run" policy that would tie Nixon's hands on the war. In a state that cast 71.8% of its 1968 vote for Nixon and George Wallace, Brock looked like a shoo-in.
He still looks like a winner, but no shoo-in. Gore quickly shucked his stuffed-shirt image by strumming a fiddle at a country store, playing checkers in courthouse squares, emphasizing his record as a populist who had fought for Medicare, tax cuts, Social Security, union security. He rode a white horse to dramatize his political purity. When Agnew fulfilled his promise to return, Gore puckishly turned out to welcome him while Brock was tied up in Washington, to the amusement of statewide TV audiences. Brock, meanwhile, has been lackluster. He lost one of his most effective issues when Florida Republicans themselves turned back Carswell in a Senate primary. With solid backing from Nixon and his own impeccable conservative credentials, Brock still leads the polls. "If we win that one," observes a high-ranking Democrat, "we'll win everything."
OHIO. In half a dozen states, the right surname on a ballot means a leg