Primary Elections

Riding the crest of his Arizona victory, an enthusiastic Steve Forbes shifted gears Wednesday, placing all of his bets on New York and a head-to-head fight with Sen. Bob Dole. As part of his strategy, Forbes is preparing to saturate the Big Apple with expensive media buys, including the half-hour call-in radio and television features that seemed to have attracted voters earlier this week in Arizona. "Sen.

Assembly Speaker Curt Pringle is on a list of potential Republican convention delegates from California pledged to support Bob Dole for president. He is also on a delegate list pledged to Lamar Alexander. But he has not made a public endorsement of either candidate. Pringle spokesman Gary Foster said that both the Dole and Alexander campaigns asked Pringle to be on their slates and he accepted. "He would like to be a delegate for California.

As they head into the flood of March primaries, each of the three major Republican contenders faces a distinct strategic imperative that will rule his efforts to stay afloat in the turbulent waters ahead. Steve Forbes, the victor in Arizona, needs to demonstrate that his successes there and last week in Delaware were no fluke. To do that, strategists believe, he will have to win elsewhere in the country--particularly in the South, where the modern Republican Party makes its home.

Their race now deep in chaos, the Republican presidential candidates headed here Wednesday for Saturday's primary--a contest looming as a defining moment in their struggle for the nomination. "The elimination process is going to begin in earnest in South Carolina," commentator Patrick J. Buchanan said Wednesday. Likewise, Robert Lighthizer, a senior advisor to Sen. Bob Dole, said, "If you don't win South Carolina, you go on and try to do the best you can, but you are truly injured."

It was a photo opportunity Sen. Bob Dole couldn't resist--hopping into the driver's seat Wednesday of BMW's latest model, the Z3 convertible used in the recent James Bond movie "Goldeneye." Nor could one of his own supporters resist posing the question the rest of the political world is pondering. With Dole pretending to take a drive, South Carolina Gov. David Beasley leaned over and asked him: "Senator, do you know where you're going and how to get there?"

CBS, ABC and CNN did not exactly sound the death knell for the struggling presidential campaign of Sen. Bob Dole when they started projecting the early results of Tuesday's Republican primary in Arizona. But they indicated that the early standings meant his bid was in critical condition. Said ABC's "Nightline" host Ted Koppel at the top of Tuesday night's broadcast: "With an embarrassing third-place finish in today's Arizona primary, is Bob Dole losing the battle?"

Voter News Service interviewed voters in the Arizona Republican primary as they left the polls. As a result, these numbers do not reflect absentee votes. The table below shows how various groups divided their votes among the candidates. For example: of all male voters, 31% voted for Steve Forbes, 31% for Patrick J. Buchanan and 28% for Bob Dole.

Publishing magnate Steve Forbes, counted out of the Republican presidential race only a week ago, bounded back Tuesday with a convincing win in the Arizona primary as the already unusual nomination contest took another sudden swerve. Sen. Bob Dole won two lesser primaries in his familiar prairie backyard of North Dakota and South Dakota. Patrick J.

The stakes in the Republican presidential campaign grew ever bigger on Thursday: enough to cast a cloud over the unity of the party itself and the GOP's treasured revolution in Congress. As all the major candidates but Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas gathered here for a debate in which they clashed over trade policy while competing over who could be tougher on illegal immigration, the Republican contest had begun vibrating so violently as to shake the party to its foundations.

From Iowa to New Hampshire over the next 10 days, the Republican presidential candidates face a breathless steeplechase through two divergent states that now constitute almost opposite poles of the modern GOP political coalition. Combined, these first two contests will probably attract only about 300,000 voters--just one-seventh as many as turned out for the 1992 GOP presidential primary in California alone.