VP Run Helped Standing in Polls : Bentsen Retains Senate Seat He’s Held for 18 Years

AUSTIN, Tex. —  Backers of Sen. Lloyd Bentsen readied the historic Driskill Hotel here for a victory celebration Tuesday night, and then settled in to see just what the prize would be.

Many recalled that this is the hotel where Lyndon B. Johnson had celebrated his election as vice president in 1960.

But early in the evening, it appeared that Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and Bentsen had failed to work the magic that the “Boston-Austin axis” had performed almost three decades ago.

Even if he did not win the vice presidency, Bentsen did retain the Senate seat he has held for 18 years and the chairmanship of the powerful Finance Committee. An unusual Texas law, passed in 1959 to accommodate Johnson’s presidential aspiration, made it possible for Bentsen to appear in two places on the ballot.

Indeed, shortly after the Texas polls closed, all three networks projected that the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket had lost in the state, but that Bentsen had won reelection to the Senate.

What’s more, he would go back to the Senate as a national leader, whose standings in the opinion polls are more favorable than those of anyone else on either ticket.

A Win ‘No Matter What’

“Lloyd Bentsen wins, no matter what happens,” said Ann Richards, the Texas State treasurer and keynote speaker at last summer’s Democratic National Convention. “If there is any loss at all, it is the nation’s loss, if Lloyd is not vice president.”

Bentsen benefited in part by comparison with his GOP counterpart, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle. But Bentsen, who had never been seen as a particularly effective speaker in the Senate, also proved a better campaigner than even his longtime associates had hoped he would be.

He traveled what the campaign estimated to be 107,500 miles through 32 states and the District of Columbia. His job was to sell the campaign on the local level, and he gave an average of more than 90 local press interviews a week.

Bentsen said Tuesday that the vice presidential spot mattered to voters “more than it ever has. We’ve never seen that kind of an impact.”

He noted that some polls showed that when voters took the No. 2 spot on the ticket into consideration, Dukakis gained 6 percentage points in Texas and 9 points in California.

Apparently Not Enough

But in Texas, it didn’t appear to be enough. George Bush, another who calls Texas home, had apparently won the state’s 29 electoral votes.

Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, Bush’s Texas campaign chairman, said the ultimate decision for the state’s voters was a simple one.

“We’ve had three vice presidents here in Texas. We’ve had one President,” Gramm said in an interview on ABC. “We sure know the difference.”

After a marathon final campaign day that culminated in a 2:30 a.m. rally here, Bentsen rested most of Election Day. He made a brief stop at his Senate campaign headquarters, where he helped volunteers with some last-minute work on their phone banks.

He also held a brief question-and-answer session with reporters who had covered his campaign. Bentsen, who had often ridiculed First Lady Nancy Reagan’s belief in astrology, laughed when he heard his own Election Day horoscope in the local paper.

“Your actions can bring magical results,” read the forecast for those born under the sign of Aquarius.

“There always was something about astrology,” he said.