BY JOSEPH MERCURIO

The winner in this year's political-myth category will be the often-quoted phrase; "No Republican can be elected statewide in New York without the Conservative Party line."

A variation of that sentence, constantly slipped into conversations on politics, is supposed to spell doom for any Republican candidate who does not toe the line and also run as a Conservative. But does it mean anything?

In the 1990s, there were twelve statewide elections and in each case the Republican candidate had the Conservative tag. In two instances, the winners had small enough margins that you could say they won because of the votes received on the Conservative line.

Impressive? Actually no. Only five candidates with the Republican and Conservative lines won and seven lost. And it has gotten worse. In the most recent statewide election, 1998, three Republicans with the Conservative line lost, including two incumbents, one losing to a candidate whose winning margin was provided on the Liberal Party line.

The Republican/Conservative marriage was not always a given. Back in the Sixties, statewide Republicans routinely won with Conservative opposition. In fact, at the end of that decade, Senator Jacob Javits started running on the Republican and Liberal Party lines.

After the tragic assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, a vacancy occurred and Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed Republican Charles Goodell to fill out the term. This created the unique circumstance of an incumbent Republican running to fill a Democrat seat.

The election was further confused by the left-right polarization resulting from the Viet Nam War and the Civil Rights movement, which dominated the public policy debate in 1968. A liberal Democrat, Dick Ottinger, opposed the incumbent Republican-Liberal Goodell, and in the campaign that followed you could not tell who was the real liberal.

Furthermore, neither major party candidate had run statewide, a major disadvantage because Jim Buckley, the Conservative candidate, had run two years earlier against Javits. Before Buckley's race against Javits, Conservative Party candidates averaged only 230,000 votes in statewide elections. Buckley received only 17% in his first race, but that was nearly 1,140,000 votes.

In Buckley's 1970 match-up against two "liberals," the first compassionate conservative articulated a coherent conservative message, with an environmentalist bent, at a time when American society was polarized. He was the right man at the perfect time. He received, on the Conservative line, a total of 2,179,640 votes giving him the win with only 39% of the vote.

No Republican has ever again received even close to that many votes on a minor party line. And the next time Buckley ran, he had the Republican and Conservative Party lines and lost re-election to Pat Moynihan, whose retirement has created this year's open Senate seat.

Since Buckley's stunning personal victory there have been 29 statewide races in New York. The Republican-Conservative candidates lost 19 of them. Among the 10 winners, however, are four candidates who won their first elections by margins they received on the Conservative line - Ned Regan, Alfonse D'Amato, George Pataki, and Dennis Vacco.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, there were Republican Governors and Attorneys General, and a Democrat Comptroller. That check and balance was reversed after the 1978 election when voters elected Democrat-Liberal candidates as Governor and Attorney General and Republican-Conservative Ned Regan as Comptroller. (Regan had run once before as a Republican). The tradition of opposition party Comptroller and the boost from his prior run were decisive in the first Republican-Conservative victory, but the alliance was born.

Next, D'Amato challenged and defeated an aged Senator Javits in the Republican Primary, which some consider a triumph of the political right. But when you look closer you see the Primary was actually a regional victory. About 38% of the vote came from machine-controlled Nassau and Suffolk counties, which supported D'Amato, a popular Long Island public official, and Javits actually beat D'Amato in conservative locales like Staten Island.

That November, D'Amato beat Elizabeth Holtzman by a narrow 81,000 votes, winning his margin on the Conservative line-an impressive Conservative victory until you notice that Javits was still on the ballot as the Liberal Party candidate receiving 664,544. If Javits had stopped campaigning, Holtzman would have won.

At the end of the nineties, the right is losing the culture-war and, consequently, elections nationally. And here in New York, election results are moving with that tide. That could spell bad news for big "C" Conservatives.

Will the Republicans go back to winning without the Conservative line? Can Hillary spin Giuliani as a right wing conservative without his having the Conservative line? More later.

Joseph Mercurio is president of National Political Services Inc., a consulting firm in New York City.