Dead Heat

The race for the Republican nomination for mayor of Philadelphia remains to close to call this afternoon. With results from 57 precincts still out, Karen Brown, the party-backed candidate, leads John Featherman by only 52 votes. Brown was a Democrat recruited by the party to be its mayoral candidate. Featherman was backed by the Loyal Opposition, an insurgent group that believes the GOP has become irrelevant in Philadelphia and needs to be revived. Whoever wins is expected to fall to Mayor Nutter in November.

Relax Arazi. New York won't be sending a super horse to challenge you in next month's Kentucky Derby. At least there was no star in sight at Aqueduct yesterday. In the 40th running of the Gotham Stakes - a $250,000 mile that sometimes serves as a major prep for the Derby - highly favored Lure, who was sensational in his 2-year-old debut at Belmont last year, and a little known 10-1 shot, Devil His Due, finished in a dead heat after running nose-to-nose the last half-mile. Side by side at the halfway point, the 3-year-olds set the pace for the field of eight, clocking a sensational half-mile time of 43.4 seconds.

THE CITY'S voters, regardless of whom they support, got the best possible news in last week's Keystone Poll, co-sponsored by the Daily News, showing Mayor Street and contender Sam Katz in a dead heat. It is cause for pause and celebration when any incumbent is subject to actual scrutiny by our herd of sheepy voters. Under the city charter, it is supposed to be nearly impossible for an incumbent mayor to lose re-election. And for 50 years, it has been. But we have a real race now, something many seem a bit afraid of. My view: We can handle it. Much has been made of the race gap in the poll: 72 percent of whites favored Katz and 70 percent of blacks favored Street.

Democrat Michael Dukakis and Republican George Bush remain in a virtual dead heat, according to a CNN-USA Today poll of registered voters. The survey of 1,260 certain voters, released yesterday found 48 percent preferred the Republican presidential ticket compared with 46 percent who favored the Democratic slate. But the margin of error of 3 percentage points negates the GOP lead. Another poll, conducted Sept. 8-10 by the Roper Organization, showed Dukakis with a 48-40 percent lead over Bush among registered voters nationwide, with 12 percent undecided.

Two weeks and a lot of competition remain in the Goodwill Games, but it is doubtful that any contest will generate the drama that David Wharton and Patrick Kuehl produced yesterday at the King County Aquatics Center. Wharton, 21, a world-class swimmer from Warminster, Pa., and Kuehl, 22, his peer from Potsdam, East Germany, sustained a superb battle throughout the men's 400-meter individual medley, as the sellout crowd cheered hysterically. And in what was probably the perfect finish for a stroke-for-stroke duel waged so magnificently, the race wound up in a dead heat - the first in Wharton's competitive experience.

U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon may yet vanquish his first serious opponent since 1989, but the war in Iraq has the Delaware County Republican reeling, according to a Keystone Poll released yesterday. The 7th Congressional District race is a statistical dead heat, with 44 percent of registered voters favoring challenger Joe Sestak, a retired Navy admiral, and 43 percent backing Weldon, according to the poll results. For a 10-term incumbent to be fighting for his political life is surprising enough, but the poll's other numbers paint an even grimmer picture.

Angie Davis doesn't usually go to political rallies, and she doesn't contribute to campaigns. But here she is, in a cheering crowd of 300, a political button on her pink cotton dress as she applauds Lawton Chiles, Florida's Democratic candidate for governor. Davis gave $10 to get Chiles elected. "I have more of a feeling for him," explains the 47-year-old nurse and mother of three. "I like the fact that he's not tied in with the rich; he's not going to have any political obligations to pay back.

It used to be in Hollywood that the initials "C.B. " would call to mind the master of the sword-and-toga epic, Cecil B. DeMille. Now they summon up the words "cross between," which has become the reigning principle of American movie-making. More often than not these days, films are conceived as a hybrid species born of two (or more) previous works. Sometimes this cross-pollenation can have satisfactory results. I give you "Dirty Dancing," which is a cross between "Saturday Night Fever" and "Goodbye, Columbus.

As it turned out, the screenwriting competition sponsored by the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema turned out to be no place for amateurs. The festival's judging committee picked two winners Wednesday (a dead heat, the judges insist) from more than 100 entries, both authored by writers whose work has already been converted into feature films. The committee named Ridley-raised writer Bruce Graham co-winner for "Reilly's Last Request," the story of a South Philadelphia tavern owner who reluctantly takes over funeral arrangements for a barfly who dies in his establishment.

F ORMER U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum , with his big lead in the Pennsylvania presidential primary all but vanishing with three weeks to go, lashed out at the Daily News pollster on a news show Sunday morning and then, on a second show, misled viewers about the pollster's work. "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace noted that Santorum's lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in Pennsylvania dropped from 29 percentage points in February to a mere 2 points last week in the Franklin & Marshall/ Daily News poll.

A new poll has former Senator Rick Santorum running even with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney among Pennsylvania Republicans. The statewide poll by the Pittsburgh Tribune Review/WPXI-TV surveyed 500 Republicans between Feb. 2-6 and showed Santorum was picking up momentum even before Tuesday's surprise victories in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. The poll, conducted by Susquehanna Polling and Research, found that Santorum's support had more than doubled - to 30 percent - in the past six weeks while Romney's increased to 29 percent.

AVONDALE, Ariz. - Kasey Kahne snapped an 81-race winless streak yesterday by holding off championship contenders Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart at Phoenix International Raceway. Stewart dominated the race, leading 160 of the 312 laps, but had to pit for gas with 18 laps remaining. He then had to work his way back to the front, and used a late pass of Jeff Burton to finish third, right behind Edwards. The points margin didn't change, and Edwards goes into this weekend's season finale leading Stewart by three points.

The race for the Republican nomination for mayor of Philadelphia remains to close to call this afternoon. With results from 57 precincts still out, Karen Brown, the party-backed candidate, leads John Featherman by only 52 votes. Brown was a Democrat recruited by the party to be its mayoral candidate. Featherman was backed by the Loyal Opposition, an insurgent group that believes the GOP has become irrelevant in Philadelphia and needs to be revived. Whoever wins is expected to fall to Mayor Nutter in November.

The two candidates for Pennsylvania's open U.S. Senate seat stuck to the safe ground of their familiar campaign messages as they debated Friday in a Pittsburgh television studio, a caution perhaps reflecting the new reality that their race has become a dead heat. Republican Pat Toomey said that Democrat Joe Sestak's votes as a suburban Philadelphia congressman showed him to be an extreme liberal "to the left" of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sestak, meanwhile, argued that Toomey was "on the fringe" of the most conservative wing of the GOP. It was the second and final debate of the campaign, broadcast live on WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh and statewide on the Pennsylvania Cable Network, one of the final chances for Toomey and Sestak to reach undecided voters.

The two men aiming to replace U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter clashed repeatedly in a debate last night, each accusing the other of lying about his "extreme" positions as polls show the race narrowing to a dead heat with less than two weeks until Election Day. U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, a Delaware County Democrat, painted former U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey, a Lehigh County Republican, as a former Wall Street trader interested only in protecting large corporations....

A third poll is showing the race in the Seventh Congressional District as a dead heat. The Franklin and Marshall College Poll released Thursday showed former U.S. Attorney Patrick Meehan leading Democratic State Rep. Bryan Lentz by about five points, with 37 percent of voters surveyed still undecided. The gap between Lentz and Meehan is within the margin of error, according to the poll. Nearly half of those surveyed said unemployment and the economy were their top concerns. More voters want their next congressman to focus on stimulating the economy than reducing the debt, the poll shows.

A third independent poll this week has said the race between freshman Democratic U.S. Rep. John Adler and Republican Jon Runyan is close. Adler finished with 42 percent to Runyan's 39 percent in the latest poll. A third-party candidate, Peter DeStefano, running with the tag line "NJ Tea Party," took 4 percent. Adler and Runyan are in a statistical dead heat because the poll's margin of error is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points. The Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey Press Media Poll called 400 likely voters from Sept.

New Jersey residents will choose a governor today following months of hard campaigning and negative advertising that have left the major-party candidates - Democratic Gov. Corzine and Republican Christopher J. Christie - in a dead heat. An estimated 2.5 million voters are expected to go to the polls at the end of a race that both parties portrayed as a referendum on the popularity of President Obama, who visited the state three times to appear with Corzine. Residents also will vote in a range of other races, choosing Assembly members, county freeholders, and municipal leaders.