Percy's Problem

Illinois Republican Charles Percy never had any qualms about running for a third term in the Senate. Nor did he have any doubt that he would be reelected. Through the summer and fall Percy, 59, enjoyed a huge 20-point lead in the polls over his obscure Democratic rival, Alex Seith, 44, a Chicago lawyer who had never before run for office. Percy scheduled only three weeks of heavy campaigning just before the election and expected a landslide victory, perhaps bigger than his 2-to-l triumph in 1972.

Last week, however, Percy's sunny forecast was unexpectedly clouded by a Chicago Sun-Times straw poll. The newspaper surveyed 23,976 voters across the state and found that Seith (rhymes with teeth) was leading 53.3% to 46.7%. The poll boasts an impressive record of accuracy dating back to 1932, and Percy last week acknowledged that he is behind. Said he: "It's the anti-incumbency feeling. People are frustrated and angry and want to take it out on someone, and I happen to be around."

Percy's problems are largely with members of his own party, especially those in the balky conservative wing, who have loathed him for years. Said a veteran Republican moderate: "The conservatives have been waiting to get him. They've been like alligators lying on a river bank." The poll shows Percy actually behind Seith in traditionally Republican counties downstate and running only a few points ahead in heavily Republican DuPage County, a Chicago suburb he swept by a margin of 50 percentage points six years ago.

Sensing Percy's unpopularity with Republican conservatives, Seith has stressed his hard-line anti-Communist views and fiscal conservatism. As a result, he has the backing of Jim Evans, chairman of the Illinois Conservative Union, while Percy has picked up endorsements from the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers and the liberal Independent Voters of Illinois.

Seith has depicted Percy as a do-nothing Senator who spends most of his time on the Georgetown cocktail circuit and tries to hide an "abysmal" voting record. Charged Seith: "He speaks out of both sides of his mouth." By criticizing the sale of jets to Saudi Arabia, Seith hopes to gain support from Jews. He has also been running an unfair advertisement on Chicago's black radio stations implying that Percy approved the racial jokes that cost former Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz his job in 1976. The ads do not mention that Percy himself had called for Butz's resignation.

A magna cum laude out of Yale, with a wife who comes from a wealthy Rochester, N.Y., family, Seith has poured $600,000 of his own and his wife's money into the campaign. Percy, stunned by his new underdog status, finds himself short on funds and has had to spend $100,000 from his personal bank account. He is now pleading for contributions to finance a last-minute TV blitz that he hopes will chase away the incumbency blues and turn the election around.

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