lizabeth Dole, a former presidential contender, plans to return to her mother's house in Salisbury, N.C., today to announce that she will run in 2002 for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Senator Jesse Helms, two Republicans said yesterday.
Mrs. Dole, 65, will join a Republican field that is still in formation. But she received good news this weekend when former Senator Lauch Faircloth announced that he would not run for the seat. Mr. Faircloth, 73, lost election to a second term in 1998 but might have competed aggressively next year for the conservative votes that are critical in North Carolina Republican primaries.
Richard Vinroot, the former mayor of Charlotte who has lost two races for governor, has announced his candidacy and has hired Carter Wrenn, a former top political consultant for Mr. Helms. Dr. Ada M. Fisher, a physician who is also from Salisbury, has joined the race, and Jim Snyder, a lawyer, is considering doing so as well.
The remaining suspense rests on Representative Richard M. Burr, a 45-year-old congressman from Winston-Salem, who is expected to announce by the end of the week whether he will compete.
Mr. Burr had said he would not run for the Senate if Mr. Faircloth did. He must now take a hard look at his viability in a multicandidate race, where only 40 percent of the vote is needed to win the primary. And he must examine whether his long-term prospects within the party will be damaged by bucking the national Republican leaders who believe that Mrs. Dole provides the strongest chance of holding the Helms seat.
"He has a strong desire to want to run," said Paul A. Shumaker, Mr. Burr's political consultant in North Carolina. "At the same time, it's important for us to be realistic."
On the Democratic side, Secretary of State Elaine F. Marshall has announced her candidacy, and State Representative Daniel T. Blue Jr. has said he will file papers to run this week. And the State Senate leader, Marc Basnight, is taking a new look at the race in light of Mr. Helms's retirement.
Mrs. Dole, formerly the secretary of both transportation and labor, had left little doubt about her plans in recent weeks. She said even before Mr. Helms announced his retirement on Aug. 22 that she would seriously consider the race if he stepped down.
Shortly after Mr. Helms disclosed his plans, she changed her voter registration to North Carolina from Kansas, the home state of her husband, former Senator Bob Dole, and she began placing hundreds of telephone calls to Republican leaders in the state. She also met with some, including Mr. Faircloth, whom she visited last week at his farm in Clinton.
Because of her high profile, gained from her years as a presidential contender, as the wife of the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, as a cabinet secretary and as president of the American Red Cross, Mrs. Dole is expected to have little trouble attracting money or news media attention.
But several political analysts in North Carolina warned today that she was not necessarily guaranteed to win either the Republican nomination or the general election.
"This is not a slam-dunk for her," said Ferrel Guillory, director of the program on Southern politics, media and public life at the University of North Carolina, where slam-dunks are easily recognized.
Mr. Guillory pointed out that Republican primaries in North Carolina were still relatively small affairs, with perhaps 300,000 voters, and that candidates had to work hard to win constituencies like gun owners and Christian conservatives.
"While her celebrity would translate into some power in a general election," he said, "a Republican primary has a lot more to do with organizing and schmoozing the leaders of factions and subfactions. Some longtime Republicans will wonder, `Well, how do I get her on the phone?' She doesn't have those kinds of ties."
While Mrs. Dole was born and reared in Salisbury, and received her undergraduate degree from Duke University, she has not lived in North Carolina for decades. Her primary residence has been the Watergate in Washington, where she and her husband share an apartment.
Yet for all her time in Washington, Mrs. Dole has not lost her image as a Southerner, or her pronounced accent.
Competitors from both parties are expected to make an issue of her absence from the state. And some in North Carolina, as elsewhere, considered Mrs. Dole's performance lackluster in last year's presidential race, though some close to her said she seemed much more energized by this campaign than that one.
Mr. Wrenn, who is working for Mr. Vinroot, said Mrs. Dole would clearly have "a major impact" on the race, and he pointed out that she and Mr. Vinroot were good friends. Indeed, he said, Mrs. Dole campaigned for Mr. Vinroot several times in his 2000 race for governor and helped him raise money this year to retire a debt.
"I suspect as in all campaigns that they're going to discuss issues and disagree," he said, "but because of the friendship it may be more cordial than in other campaigns."
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