Edwards Leads Duke in Louisiana Balloting : Election: With 18% of the vote in, he has a 59%-41% edge over the former klansman. Networks project ex-governor as the winner.

Early returns Saturday night gave former Democratic Gov. Edwin W. Edwards the lead over former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in Louisiana’s turbulent and historic gubernatorial race.

With 18% of the precincts reporting shortly after the polls closed at 6 p.m. PST, Edwards, a three-time former governor, led Duke, a Republican state representative, by 59% to 41%.

All the major television networks projected Edwards as the winner, based on exit polls.

Voter turnout was heavy in the final act of an often bizarre contest that has attracted more nationwide attention than any American gubernatorial election in decades. It pitted Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Nazi sympathizer, against Edwards, whose last term as governor in the mid-1980s was marred by federal racketeering charges against him.

State election officials had predicted a record turnout of between 72% to 75%, surpassing the previous turnout record of 69.56% set in the 1979 gubernatorial election.

Duke told reporters Saturday afternoon that turnout in his rural strongholds appeared to be “absolutely tremendous.” Likewise, in some black precincts of New Orleans, election officials said the turnout could exceed 80%.

At the Wicker School, in a predominantly black section of the city, election commissioner Leola Lyons said: “We had more people vote today at noon than we did for the entire October primary.”

Wheeling her baby away from a polling place in another largely black area of New Orleans, voter Jessie Brown summarized the prevailing sentiment: “Everybody is coming out today,” she said. “Everybody is going to vote today.”

Duke, whose background has dominated the race, spent part of the morning leading a horn-blowing motorcade of as many as 100 cars that rode through his home base in the blue-collar New Orleans suburb of Metairie. At noon, he voted at a local elementary school under a canopy of television lights and microphones that followed him to the edge of the booth.

To the crowd of reporters, he predicted that he would win the race with 50.8% of the vote to 49.2% for Edwards. “I stand for the things the people of this state stand for,” he said.

As is his custom, Edwards spent Election Day out of sight, talking with precinct leaders from his headquarters in New Orleans’ Monteleone Hotel after voting by absentee ballot. Edwards aides said 2,000 people were working to get out the vote in Orleans Parish alone.

The campaign drew reporters from around the world and sparked interest from around the nation.

Duke’s crusade attracted hundreds of financial contributions from California, New York, Florida and Texas. Out-of-state volunteers also traveled to Louisiana to join his effort.

Those rallying to Edwards’ side included Bob Mulholland, political director of the California Democratic Party, who on Friday flew to Louisiana to deliver a $1,000 check to the former governor’s campaign and knock on doors in the get-out-the-vote drive.

“If Duke wins, he will make people who are serious racists feel they can do a lot more public things,” Mulholland said.

Many Louisianians have been anguished by the critical shadow Duke’s ascent has cast over their state, and among his opponents the drive to see him repudiated has become as much a moral as a political necessity.

“I want to make sure you understand we’re all not full of hate, we’re all not racists,” New Orleans attorney Rick Duplantier told a reporter last week. “He’s just not what we stand for down here.”

And yet others across the state have heard echoes of their own deepest beliefs in Duke’s astringent attacks on government, affirmative action and welfare recipients, and his promise of “equal rights for everybody.”

“I want him to be governor because it’s about time for somebody to stand up for white people,” Frank Stieffel, a shipyard worker from Metairie, said as he cheered at a high-spirited Duke rally Friday night.

Such competing viewpoints dazed and divided the state to a degree unmatched by any political campaign in memory. The preserve of Huey Long and Earl Long, of fragile alliances and lasting enmities, Louisiana has long experienced politics as drama, politics as farce, but for many here this is something new: politics as tragedy. “It’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced,” said Duplantier. “It’s a civil war.”

It seemed that way when Marilyn Blappert and Hope Price, acquaintances in the New Orleans suburb of Arabi, arrived to vote Saturday morning. When Blappert asked Price if she was voting for Duke, the younger woman told her, “No. I’m not a Nazi.”

Blappert fixed Price with a cold look and replied: “Neither am I, and I’m not speaking to you.

“I’m Duke from here to here,” Blappert said, pointing from her head to her toes. “If he gets in, it will be a white Christmas.”

As University of New Orleans student Lydia Kucera left a Metairie polling place after voting for Duke, she said the election had raised such strong feelings that even her brothers and sisters would not tell her whom they supported.

Several miles away in the 6th Ward of New Orleans, State Rep. Charles Jones said blacks were “scared to death” by the prospect of a Duke victory. “Many of us haven’t slept a night” during the campaign, he said.

Throughout the campaign, many voters recoiled from both candidates. A song running on a New Orleans radio station that denounced both men to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine” expressed what polls suggested was widespread unhappiness about the choice voters faced Saturday.

“The only person in the state of Louisiana that Edwin Edwards could beat is David Duke,” said pollster Mark Mellman, who has worked with the state Democratic Party. “The only person in the state that David Duke could beat is Edwin Edwards.”

To a considerable extent, this election was navigated through the rear-view mirror--it focused much more on the candidates’ pasts than the state’s future. Both Edwards and Duke have described the chance to serve as governor as an opportunity for redemption.

Edwards, 64, began his political career in the late 1950s by striking a progressive note on racial questions. In 1971, after winning seats in the state Legislature and Congress, Edwards outlasted a crowded field to win the governorship. But the victory raised charges that Edwards sold state jobs in return for campaign contributions; Duke resurrected the accusations in advertisements on Friday.

Edwards easily won reelection in 1975, but the state’s two-term limit forced him to step down four years later. In 1983, he reclaimed the governorship by easily ousting his successor, Republican David Treen.

But during his third term, Edwards’ reputation for high-living and scandal began to catch up with him. He faced two federal trials on charges of selling state approvals for hospitals and nursing homes.

Although the first trial ended in a hung jury and the second in acquittal, the proceedings left an unflattering picture of the governor. In 1987, he was ousted from office by then-Democratic Rep. Buddy Roemer.

Although many Louisiana political observers believe Edwards was drawn back to politics primarily by a passion to humiliate Roemer, he now portrays himself as a man on a mission to restore his place in history. “I know it’s my last best chance . . . to leave the legacy I want to leave,” he told supporters at a rally last week.

Duke’s background lacks any of Edwards’ roguish charm. Born in Oklahoma, he grew up in Louisiana where he fell under the influence of white supremacists as a teen-ager. By the 1970s, he was active in Nazi and klan organizations.

Duke had repeatedly failed in bids for elected office starting in 1975. But in 1989, he surprised all observers by winning a seat in the state House of Representatives from a Metairie district. The next year he signaled his growing political strength by polling an overall mark of 44%--and 60% of the white vote--in a challenge to Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston.

Most analysts again discounted Duke, 41, in this year’s gubernatorial race. But he placed a strong second to Edwards in the October primary--in the process ousting Gov. Roemer, who had recently switched to the GOP.

The shockwave rattled through the White House, which faced a drumbeat of Democratic charges that the use of racial imagery by President Bush, like President Ronald Reagan before him, had fertilized the ground for Duke. Last week, Democratic presidential candidate Paul E. Tsongas raised a cry of approval from an AFL-CIO convention by declaring: “David Duke is the son of George Bush.”

Bush, however, has denounced Duke and said that if he lived in Louisiana he would vote for Edwards. For those comments, many Duke supporters branded the President a hypocrite. “Duke’s platform comes after Bush’s platform,” Kirk Landry, a Metairie hotel manager, said Friday afternoon as he took a break from campaigning for Duke. “If anybody should look in the mirror, it’s George Bush.”

Others say the President should look over his shoulder: Whatever the final result Saturday, many here believe Duke may challenge Bush next year, either in the Republican presidential primaries or as a third-party candidate in November.

Duke on Friday again denied any intention to run against Bush, but did not rule out the prospect of seeking the White House when asked in a radio interview. And he leaves little doubt that he sees an audience for his message that extends far beyond the bayous and oil fields of Louisiana.

“It’s going strong all over the state of Louisiana, it’s going strong all over the South, it’s going strong all over the country,” he declared at his final campaign rally Friday night, his voice almost drowned out by raucous cheers. “We are the cutting edge of the new conservative politics we will have in America.”

Times special correspondents Patrick Thomas and Garry Boullard contributed to this story.