NATIONAL POLITICS: 1968 ELECTIONS

The Republican Nomination Race

Romney Leads Early.

After the resounding defeat of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964 the Republican Party was left leaderless and seemed moribund. One bright spot in that year, when many Republican candidates for national and state offices had gone down in defeat with Goldwater, was the reelection of George Romney, the popular Republican governor of Michigan, where voters had favored Johnson over Goldwater by a margin of two to one. Even before he was elected to a third two-year term, Romney had emerged as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968, with promises of support from Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York and most other Republicans.

Romney Falters.

In November 1966 polls showed Romney leading President Johnson by 54 to 46 percent, and the Michigan Republican continued to lead the president by similar margins through spring 1967. By then Romney, who was a poor public speaker, was beginning to look like a political lightweight, waffling on expressing his own "dovish" opposition to the Vietnam War for fear of offending Republican "hawks," who supported the presence of American troops in Southeast Asia. On 31 August 1967, after he had come out clearly in opposition to the war, he explained his evolution from an earlier prowar stance by saying that during a visit to Vietnam two years earlier he had been "brainwashed" by American diplomats and military men. Romney never recovered from the damage this remark inflicted on his candidacy. On 28 February 1964, after polls showed Richard M. Nixon leading him five to one in the New Hampshire Republican primary, Romney withdrew from the presidential race.

The Nixon Comeback.

The rehabilitation of Nixon as a viable national candidate was one of the great political surprises of 1968. After losing the California gubernatorial race to Democrat Edmund G. (Pat) Brown in 1962, Nixon had announced that he was leaving politics and joined a prestigious law firm in Manhattan. Yet he had briefly considered entering the presidential race in 1964, and in 1966 he had tirelessly and successfully campaigned for Republican candidates, establishing himself as the party's senior spokesman.

Nixon Wins Primaries.

To earn his party's support for his second presidential bid, Nixon had to prove that he could win primaries. Declaring himself "better qualified to handle the problems of the Presidency than I was in 1960," Nixon accused the Johnson administration of failing "to use our military power effectively" or "our diplomatic power wisely." He promised to "End the War and Win the Peace," while curbing inflation and reestablishing law and order at home. He won the New Hampshire Republican primary on 12 March with more than 80,000 votes, more votes than the total cast for all other candidates from both parties, beating write-in candidate Nelson Rockefeller by a margin of seven to one. Nixon went on to win in Wisconsin (2 April), Indiana (7 May), and Nebraska (14 May) with little or no opposition before he faced and defeated California governor Ronald Reagan in Oregon (28 May).

Implementing a "Southern Strategy."

On 1 June Nixon met with Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Sen. John Tower of Texas, and other southern Republican leaders in Atlanta to clarify for them his position on civil rights. While he supported the policy of refusing federal funds to districts where schools were clearly segregated, he disapproved of withholding those funds for tardiness in complying with precise white/black student ratios mandated by federal officials, and he opposed compulsory busing to achieve school integration. Also reassuring Senator Thurmond of his belief in a strong national defense, Nixon left Atlanta with the 394 convention votes of the South and the border states virtually locked up.

Opposition from Reagan and Rockefeller.

By the end of April, however, Nixon faced opposition from the right and the left of his own party. Conservative Ronald Reagan was still in the race, and in June and July he concentrated on the South, where he tried to pry loose delegates already committed to Nixon. Liberal Nelson Rockefeller, who had called a press conference on 21 March to "reiterate unequivocally" that he was not a candidate, called another on 30 April to announce that he was in the race after all. That same day he won all 34 Massachusetts delegates as a write-in candidate in that state's Republican primary. Campaigning with poll data indicating that he had a better chance than Nixon of beating any Democrat, Rockefeller had little hope of gathering the 667 votes that would give him a first-ballot convention victory, but he hoped he could win on a subsequent ballot if he and Reagan could do well enough in the first round of voting to keep Nixon below 600.

The Republican Convention.

Just one week before the Republican National Convention opened in Miami on 5 August, a Gallup poll showed that suddenly Nixon was ahead of Rockefeller, Vice-president Hubert Humphrey, or Senator Eugene McCarthy, and capable of beating either Democrat. Nixon arrived at the convention believing he had just barely enough votes to win on the first ballot. He cooperated with Rockefeller, Romney, and others to revise the Vietnam War plank from a call for escalation of the war to a promise for new leadership to "offer a fair and equitable settlement to all, based on the principle of self-determination," a "pledge to develop a clear and purposeful negotiating position," and a statement of "total support" for the troops in Vietnam. On 8 August, despite a last-minute scare when Nixon's floor leader counted only 666 votes as the balloting started, Nixon won the nomination in the first round with a margin of only 25 votes: 692 to 277 for Rockefeller and 182 for Reagan.

Nixon Picks Agnew.

In selecting a running mate Nixon sought to not to offend either wing of the party. Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland was a moderate from a border state. He had nominated Nixon in a speech that had enlivened an otherwise boring convention, and no one Nixon consulted had anything bad to say about him. Armed with this compromise running mate, Nixon gave a stirring acceptance speech, promising to "bring an honorable end to the Vietnam War" and calling on the leaders of the Soviet Union and China to join him in ending "an era of confrontation" for a new "era of negotiation." Yet—as the race riots that had raged in another part of Miami throughout the convention continued—the delegates' greatest enthusiasm was for Nixon's pledge to reimpose law and order at home: "Time is running out for the merchants of crime and corruption."

The Democratic Nomination Race

Opposition to Johnson.

In autumn 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson seemed certain of winning the Democratic Party nomination to run for a second full term as president. Yet a revolt from within his own party was brewing. Since 1965 Johnson's increasing escalation of the war in Vietnam had been paralleled by an ever-growing, increasingly militant antiwar movement. Politicians in both parties had begun to question the handling of the war and to charge that the United States should never have committed troops to Vietnam in the first place. Convinced that they could not unseat a sitting president, antiwar Democrats such as Senators Robert F. Kennedy of New York, Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, and George McGovern of South Dakota—as well as Lt. Gen. James Gavin—had all rebuffed suggestions that they oppose Johnson for the presidential nomination. Yet on 30 November, believing that someone had to take the opposition's message to the people, McCarthy announced his candidacy.

McCarthy's Moral Victory in New Hampshire.

McCarthy's chances for success in the New Hampshire Democratic primary on 12 March 1968 appeared slim. Polls predicted in late January that he would get no more than 8-11 percent of the vote. Then the North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched their major Tet offensive on 30 January. Though American troops achieved total victory in the battle, the event badly eroded public confidence in Johnson's assurances that the United States was winning the war. Student volunteers who had gotten "clean for Gene"—cutting off long hair and shaving off beards and mustaches—blanketed New Hampshire in an effective door-to-door campaign to take McCarthy's message to the voters. Johnson, who had chosen to run as he had in 1964, by remaining above the political fray in Washington, was not officially entered in the primary but won 49 percent of the vote as a write-in candidate. McCarthy, however, got 42 percent and claimed a moral victory. When Republican write-ins for both candidates were added in, Johnson beat McCarthy by only 239 votes.

Kennedy Enters the Race.

More of the McCarthy voters in New Hampshire were hawks disillusioned with Johnson than doves opposed to the war. Yet a nationwide Gallup poll showed a major shift to the antiwar camp during the six weeks following the Tet offensive. In February 60 percent of those polled called themselves hawks while only 24 percent said they were doves. In March the doves outnumbered the hawks by 42 to 41 percent. Kennedy realized that he had underestimated the strength of voter sentiment against the war and entered the presidential race four days after the New Hampshire primary. While he could attract students and intellectuals from McCarthy, Kennedy had a broad political base that also included minorities and working-class whites in major urban areas of the states with the most electoral votes.

Johnson Withdraws.

At the end of March Johnson's aides warned him that he faced certain defeat in Wisconsin, where McCarthy was campaigning with an army of eight thousand student volunteers. On 31 March Johnson announced on television that he had ordered a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and invited the Hanoi government to begin negotiations to end the war. Then Johnson made a second announcement: "I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year.…Accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President." Two days later McCarthy defeated Johnson in the Wisconsin primary by 56.2 to 34.6 percent.

McCarthy and Kennedy Square Off.

The two antiwar candidates faced one another for the first time in the Indiana primary (7 May), where Kennedy won 42.3 percent to 27 percent for McCarthy and 30.7 percent for a stand-in for Vice-president Hubert H. Humphrey, who had announced his candidacy on 17 April, after the last filing date for the primaries. Kennedy had a bigger victory over Humphrey and McCarthy in Nebraska (14 May)—51.7 percent of the vote—but McCarthy beat Kennedy by 44.1 to 38.1 percent in Oregon on 28 May.

Humphrey Wins Delegates.

While public attention had been largely focused on McCarthy and Kennedy's primary battles, Humphrey—the choice of the party regulars—had been winning the delegate wars in non-primary states. Of the two peace candidates, Kennedy seemed to have a better chance of stopping Humphrey, but a win in California on 4 June was crucial for Kennedy. He won with 46.3 percent of the vote over McCarthy with 41.8 and a stand-in for Humphrey with 11.9 percent. In the early hours of 5 June, just after making a victory speech to his supporters, he was shot by a lone gunman and died the next day.

McCarthy's Victory in New York.

McCarthy won 62 of 123 New York delegates on 18 June; that primary also committed 30 to the late Robert Kennedy, 12 to Humphrey, and left 19 uncommitted.

McGovern Declares His Candidacy.

As the convention approached, McCarthy picked up some of Kennedy's delegates, but about 300 went to Senator George McGovern, who announced his candidacy on 10 August, two weeks before the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on the twenty-sixth. Humphrey seemed to have the nomination sewn up, however, and McCarthy—never a dynamic campaigner—approached the convention with an apparent lack of direction that lent credence to McGovern's response when asked what made his candidacy different from McCarthy's: 'Well—Gene doesn't want to be President, and I do."

The "Draft-Teddy" Movement.

To beat Humphrey required not only rallying all the McCarthy, McGovern, and uncommitted Robert Kennedy delegates behind a single candidate, but also sparking a sizable defection from the Humphrey camp. A few days before the start of the convention, a coalition of political doves who believed Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was their only hope started a "Draft-Teddy" movement. Promised support from McCarthy and Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who had secretly expressed antiwar sentiments for some time and who controlled most of the Illinois votes, the only surviving Kennedy brother unequivocally refused to run.

The Democratic Convention.

The convention began and ended in acrimony. From floor fights over delegates' credentials and rules for voting, the Democrats went on to a bitter debate on the Vietnam War platform plank.

Johnson Dictates the Vietnam Plank.

Before the convention, representatives of Humphrey and Edward Kennedy had worked out a plank designed to be acceptable to both McCarthy and Johnson, but the president had expressed outright opposition to it. Rather than anger Johnson—who possessed the power to deny Humphrey the nomination—Humphrey threw his support to a majority plank that restated Johnson's policies. This plank rejected the possibility of "unilateral withdrawal" of American troops and called for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam only "when the action would not endanger the lives of our troops." The minority plank drawn up by McCarthy forces called for an immediate halt to the bombing and "an early withdrawal of a significant number of our troops." As the voting concluded, with the majority plank winning by a three-to-two margin, some peace delegates put on black armbands and chanted "Stop the War," while others sang "We Shall Overcome."

The Battle in the Streets.

As the wrangling delegates moved on toward the by-then inevitable nomination of Humphrey, the real political drama was taking place in the streets of Chicago, where the police and antiwar demonstrators had been warring all week. Protesters carried out their plan to hold a major demonstration during the nominations process at the convention. The police had been clubbing and teargassing demonstrators all week. Now, as about forty-five hundred of them marched toward the convention site, police armed with clubs, mace, and tear gas charged the crowd, beating protesters, journalists, and bystanders alike. As protesters chanted "The whole world is watching," tear gas seeped into the windows of the twenty-fifth-floor hotel suite where Humphrey was working on his acceptance speech. The official report on the riot, submitted later that year to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, a group appointed by President Johnson, concluded that while a few protesters had deliberately provoked them, the police response was excessive, amounting to a "police riot" that injured more than one thousand mostly innocent people.

Humphrey Wins Amid Acrimony.

Delegates within the convention hall were unaware of the violence in the streets until about an hour later, when television coverage of a seconding speech for Humphrey was interrupted with the first available film footage. Angry peace delegates threatened to walk out, and Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff used his nominating speech for McGovern to denounce "Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago." Finally, at 11:19 P.M., far later than the primetime slot for which it was scheduled, the first roll call of the delegates began. Humphrey won the nomination easily with 1,760 1/4 votes to 601 for McCarthy and 146 1/2 for McGovern. The next evening Humphrey's acceptance speech failed to unite his badly divided party, and McCarthy refused to stand on the platform with Humphrey and his running mate, Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine.

MOBE, THE YIPPIES, AND THE "SIEGE OF CHICAGO"

The National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), headed by long-time pacifist David Dellinger, set out to attract the largest possible number of antiwar demonstrators to Chicago for Democratic National Convention week by planning a sort of multiple-choice protest like their huge October 1967 antiwar demonstrations in Washington, where the level of protest—from lawful assembly to passive resistance to civil disobedience—was left up to the individual, MOBE's plans were undermined by the refusal of Chicago authorities to grant the necessary permits and by the violent behavior of the Chicago police department during an April 1968 antiwar protest and the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Many moderates who might otherwise have attended the demonstrations stayed away. About two thousand protesters had shown up in Chicago by the weekend before the convention. By Wednesday, 28 August, the day on which Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination, the number had risen to about ten thousand.

Among those who did show up in Chicago were the Yippies, who had told Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, the MOBE coordinators for the Chicago demonstrations, that they had no interest in their traditional format of speeches and a large-scale protest march. Mostly the brainchild of radical activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies (short for Youth International Party) were a mock political party whose members, its founders announced, would be any hippie who came to Chicago. There the Yippies staged a "Festival of Life" to counter the "National Death Convention" (aka the National Democratic Convention) and nominated Pigasus, a real pig, as their "presidential candidate." This mock convention and other events during convention week met with violent reactions from the Chicago police, who used clubs and tear gas on demonstrators throughout the week.

The greatest mayhem occurred when—despite its inability to obtain a parade permit—MOBE attempted to carry out its planned two-mile march from Grant Park to the convention site on the night of Humphrey's nomination. Policemen waded into the crowd of about forty-five hundred, beating demonstrators, newsmen, and innocent bystanders with their billy clubs. Hundreds were injured that night, bringing the total number of injured demonstrators for the week to more than a thousand. Nearly two hundred policemen were also injured.

Though many demonstrators angered the police with verbal taunts, and a relatively small number of protesters are known to have thrown rocks and bottles or otherwise assaulted policemen, Daniel Walker's official report to President Johnson's National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence concluded that "police action was not confined to the necessary force" and events in Chicago would best be described as a "police riot." Nonetheless, after the inauguration of Richard M. Nixon in 1969, Dellinger, Hayden, Davis, Hoffman, and Rubin, along with two other MOBE volunteers and Black Panther Bobby Seale (who was in Chicago just long enough to give an angry speech), were indicted under a federal anti-riot law. After a lengthy trial and appeals process, however, all convictions were overturned.

Sources:

David Farber, Chicago '68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);

Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1988);

Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (New York: World, 1968);

Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: Convention Week in Chicago, August 25-29, 1968, A Report Submitted to the National Commission on the. Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: Dutton, 1968).

The 1968 Elections

The Third-Party Challenge.

In the battle for the presidency Humphrey and Nixon had to fend off the advances of George C. Wallace, a segregationist former governor of Alabama, who attracted voters from the conservative wings of both parties. Wallace, who had managed to get on the ballot in sixteen states before withdrawing from the presidential race in 1964, was on the ballot in all fifty states for the 1968 elections. Between May and September 1968 Wallace's approval ratings rose steadily from 9 to 21 percent. If these numbers continued to increase at the same pace, some pollsters suggested, Wallace would get nearly 30 percent of the vote on election day. This projection suggested that Wallace's campaign strategy was working. He knew he could not win, but he hoped that he could take seventeen southern and border states (north to Delaware and Missouri) for a total of 177 electoral votes. If he succeeded, neither major-party candidate would have a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Then Nixon or Humphrey would have to bargain with him for his electors, or the House of Representatives would be forced to choose the next president.

The Politics of Backlash.

Wallace profited from the white backlash against civil rights sparked in part by the urban race riots that had been flaring up every summer since 1964 and from the conservative backlash against the antiwar movement, whose demonstrations had become larger, more disruptive, and more violent since 1964. Counting on southern support, Wallace campaigned heavily in northern states where blue-collar voters shared these sentiments, hoping not so much to win electoral votes as to demonstrate—with an eye to 1972—that his support was not merely regional.

Wallace's Downfall.

Seeking to win the same southern and border states as Wallace, Nixon based his southern campaign on the premise that most Wallace supporters were not racists, but simply voters fed up with civil unrest, the Johnson administration's expensive liberal social programs, and its conduct of the Vietnam War. Never attacking Wallace directly, Nixon found that one of the most effective weapons in his southern strategy was the suggestion that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Vice-president Humphrey. Humphrey, who saw Wallace's appeal to northern blue-collar workers cutting into the Democrats' traditional support from organized labor, got help from the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE), whose widely distributed anti-Wallace literature pointed out that the populist "friend of the workingman" was actually antiunion.

Wallace Frightens Voters.

Wallace hurt himself as well, by often seeming to incite clashes between demonstrators and police at his campaign stops. The only candidate to call for total military victory in Vietnam, Wallace chose as his running mate Gen. Curtis E, LeMay, already well known for his remark that the United States could, and probably should, "bomb the North Vietnamese back to the Stone Age." This statement, and others advocating the use of nuclear weapons, frightened voters—just as Barry Goldwater's comments about atom bombs had scared them in 1964.

The Nonissue of the War.

President Johnson asked both Nixon and Humphrey not to discuss the war lest they weaken America's position at the negotiating table. Having had no involvement in decisions about the war, Nixon could afford to stick to the law-and-order issue and to say only that he had a secret strategy to end the conflict. (Even after Nixon was elected, he never revealed this plan.) Humphrey, however, was closely associated with the Johnson administration's policies, having supported them loyally even when he disagreed privately. Since the Democratic National Convention in August, Humphrey had known that to have any hope of winning the election he had to present his own Vietnam policy, even if it angered Johnson. Finally, on 30 September he went on national television to address the issue. While Johnson tied a total bombing halt to further concessions from the North Vietnamese, Humphrey said he would stop all bombing immediately, while reserving "the right to resume bombing" if the North Vietnamese showed "bad faith." Humphrey's position was closer to Johnson's than it was to the minority peace plank voted down at the Democratic National Convention, but it was enough to silence the antiwar demonstrators who had been disrupting his campaign stops with chants of "Dump the Hump." Antiwar liberals began to consider Humphrey an acceptable candidate; campaign contributions increased; and Humphrey's numbers started going up in the polls.

An Election Too Close to Call.

On 27 September a Gallup poll showed Nixon leading Humphrey by 43 to 28 percent, with 21 percent for Wallace. By 21 October—as Wallace's support faded—Nixon was still ahead, by 44 to 36 percent, but Humphrey was clearly gaining. The final Gallup poll, completed on the Saturday before the election, reported that Nixon's lead over Humphrey had dropped to only two percentage points (42-40). The last Harris poll, conducted over the weekend, showed Humphrey leading Nixon (43-40). Both pollsters considered the election too close to call.

Nixon's Narrow Victory.

Nixon won 43.4 percent of the popular vote, with 42.7 percent for Humphrey and 13.5 for Wallace. Nixon took thirty-two states with a total of 301 electoral votes. If Humphrey and Wallace together had won just 34 more electoral votes, Nixon's total would have gone below the 270 votes needed to win, and the election would have gone to the House of Representatives, where the Democratic majority would most likely have made Humphrey president.

Republican Gains in Congress.

Although Nixon's coattails were not long enough to carry in Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, the Republicans made gains in both houses. The liberal-dominated Congress of 1965-1966 was gone for good.

The Senate Inches to the Right.

According to Congressional Quarterly ratings of senators without regard to party, liberal strength in the Senate remained the same—at 44 senators—before and after the election; the number of moderates dropped from 26 to 22 while conservatives increased from 30 to 34. Republicans had a net gain of five new seats, bringing the total of Republican senators to 42, the largest number since 1956. Among the 7 Republicans who won seats previously held by Democrats were Barry Goldwater, former senator (1953-1965) from Arizona, replacing retiring Democrat Carl Hayden, the ninety-one-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate; and newcomer Robert W. Packwood of Oregon, who defeated liberal Democrat Wayne Morse, one of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam War. Another Republican freshman was Robert Dole of Kansas, while Democratic newcomers included Alan Cranston of California and Harold E. Hughes of Iowa—the only Democrats who won seats previously held by Republicans—and Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri.

Antiwar Senators Reelected.

There were only two casualties among the opponents of the Vietnam War who were up for reelection in 1968. Ironically they were the only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964: Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, who lost in his state's Democratic primary. Democrats J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut, Frank Church of Idaho, Birch Bayh of Indiana, George McGovern of South Dakota, and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin were all reelected, as was liberal Republican Jacob K. Javits of New York.

Republican Gains in the House.

The GOP had hoped to win the 30 seats it needed for control of the House of Representatives. If they had come even close to that number, some Republicans thought, they could gain a majority by convincing a few southern Democrats to switch parties. But their net gain was only 4 seats, as voters tended to stick with incumbents (223 Democrats and 173 Republicans), electing only 39 newcomers (20 Democrats and 19 Republicans).

Republicans Dominate Gubernatorial Races.

Having picked up the governorship of Kentucky in 1967, the Republicans added 5 more in 1968, to control the state-houses of 31 states. (This number dropped to 30 after the Maryland legislature elected a Democrat to replace Republican governor Spiro T. Agnew, who resigned after he was elected vice-president.) The victory of Richard B. Ogilvie over incumbent Democrat Samuel H. Shapiro of Illinois gave Republicans governorships in six of the seven most populous states. In fact, states with Republican governors had a total population of 132 million while Democrats governed states whose population totaled 67 million.

Sources:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 24(1968);

Time, 92 (15 November 1968): 3-39;

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (New York: Atheneum, 1969).

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1960 ELECTIONS

The Democratic Nomination Race

Kennedy's Strategy.

The biggest obstacle Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts faced in his bid for the presidency was his religion. He was the second Roman Catholic to run for the highest elected office in the United States on a major-party ticket. The first, Democratic governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, had won only eight states when he ran against Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928, convincing leaders in both parties that a Catholic could not win a national election. Kennedy knew that his first task in seeking the Democratic nomination was to convince party leaders that he could attract a broad range of voters. He needed not just to win primaries but to win them in ways that proved his appeal to non-Catholics.

Delegate Selection Processes.

By 1972 primary elections were the principal vehicle for securing the presidential nomination of a major party, but in 1960 only sixteen states held primaries. Most national convention delegates were selected by state-party organizations and their leadership. While primaries were important vehicles for demonstrating voter strength, it was possible for the nomination to go to a candidate who had never entered a primary. With no clear front-runner at the beginning of the race to head the Democratic ticket, many believed that several rounds of voting would take place at the national convention, freeing up delegates bound by primary results on the first ballot.

Symington and Johnson Plan for a Deadlocked Convention.

Sen, Stuart Symington of Missouri based his strategy on this belief. Assured of support from former president and fellow Missourian Harry'S Truman but not well known in the primary states, Symington aimed his campaign at the Democratic power brokers, hoping to convince them that, with his strong record on defense and his liberal record on civil rights and labor issues, he would be the ideal compromise candidate in the event of a deadlocked convention. Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who had been a southern favorite-son candidate in 1956, believed that early convention balloting in I960 would be inconclusive. As Senate majority leader since 1954, he had earned a reputation as a brilliant political strategist. With the convention deadlocked, Johnson reasoned, he could win the nomination by calling in payments on the huge pile of political debts owed him and another influential Texas Democrat, Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House of Representatives.

Humphrey Takes the Primary Route.

The fourth major candidate was Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, a senator since 1948 and respected for his anti-communist stance. Nonetheless, his longtime support of civil rights and other liberal causes had convinced party regulars that he was too far left to win a national election. Like Kennedy, Humphrey had to demonstrate broad voter appeal, but unlike the independently wealthy Kennedy, he could not afford an all-out primary campaign. He decided not to enter the New Hampshire primary (8 March I960), considering it a waste of time and money to challenge Kennedy in his own backyard.

New Hampshire and Wisconsin Primaries.

Faced with no serious opposition in New Hampshire, Kennedy won 85.2 percent of the vote, with a local ballpoint-pen manufacturer coming in a distant second. Kennedy went on to face Humphrey in Wisconsin (5 April), widely viewed as Humphrey territory since he came from a neighboring state. Humphrey's campaign was no match for Kennedy's well-organized effort, and though the two candidates spent about the same amount of money, Kennedy won 56.5 percent of the vote, picking up twenty-two convention delegates to Humphrey's twelve. Yet Humphrey had won the four predominantly Protestant districts while Kennedy had done best in the four districts where the majority of the voters were Catholic.

Kennedy Overcomes the Religion Issue.

The real test came when Humphrey and Kennedy faced off in West Virginia (10 May), a state that was 95 percent Protestant. During the Wisconsin campaign, the national media had picked up on religion as a means of differentiating between two candidates who shared similar views on political issues. Soon voters were hearing the same charge that had been leveled in 1928: if a Roman Catholic were elected president, the pope would be the de facto head of the executive branch. In December 1959 Louis Harris, Kennedy's personal pollster, had predicted that Kennedy would take 70 percent of the West Virginia vote to Humphrey's 30. Three weeks before the primary, after the religious issue had taken center stage, Harris discovered that Humphrey's support had risen to 60 percent while Kennedy's had dropped to 40. Going against the advice of his campaign staff, Kennedy tackled the issue head on. Two days before the voting Kennedy delivered an impassioned speech on West Virginia television. He began by asking why he should have been "denied the right to be President on the day I was baptized." Then he pointed out that in taking the oath of office, in which he swears to uphold the U.S. Constitution, the president is promising to support the separation of Church and State. "And if he breaks his oath/' Kennedy added, "he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution, but he is committing a sin against God." The speech effectively redefined the religious issue as tolerance versus intolerance, and Kennedy won easily in West Virginia with 60.8 percent of the popular vote. Humphrey withdrew from the race.

Kennedy's Campaign in Nonprimary States.

Kennedy won other primaries, but none was as important as West Virginia, which convinced party leaders that Kennedy was an attractive candidate. Backed by extensive research and in-depth knowledge of politics, the Kennedy campaign effectively canvassed party leaders in every state, destroying Symington's chances and earning votes even in Johnson's western strongholds.

Johnson Enters the Race.

By the time Johnson declared his candidacy, less than a week before the Democratic National Convention opened in Los Angeles on 11 July, he estimated that he had 502 1/2 of the 761 votes needed to win the nomination, while Kennedy had 602 1/2 committed to him on the first ballot. If Kennedy could be stopped short of 761 on the first round of voting, the convention could go into the proverbial "smoke-filled back room," and Johnson could emerge the winner.

The Democratic Convention.

Another challenge came from a powerful Draft-Stevenson movement, which continued right up to the evening of Wednesday, 13 July, when Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy delivered an impassioned nomination speech for Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, who had lost to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Yet Stevenson declined to announce his candidacy after learning that he would not have the support of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, head of his home-state delegation who had already committed to Kennedy. In the midst of these challenges, the Kennedy team continued campaigning. Their candidate won on the first ballot, with 806 votes, followed by Johnson with 409. Choosing Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy proclaimed in his acceptance speech that "the world is changing. The old era is ending.…" Americans were, he said, "standing on the edge of a New Frontier."

The Republican Nomination Race

Rockefeller Challenges Nixon.

As vice-president for eight years under the popular President Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon was heir apparent to the presidency in the eyes of most Republican Party regulars. He faced early opposition from Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. Rockefeller had quit an appointed position in the Eisenhower administration because he considered its politics indecisive; he disliked Nixon and considered him incapable of being an effective president. Rockefeller had ranked slightly ahead of Nixon in a spring 1959 poll of Republicans, but on his trip to the Soviet Union that summer, Nixon enhanced his image as a natural leader in the so-called kitchen debate with Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a Moscow trade fair.

Party Regulars Back Nixon.

By December 1959 it was apparent to Rockefeller that the party regulars who controlled most convention delegates were committed to Nixon, as were the big businessmen who would fund the Republican campaign. Though he could finance his campaign from his own large fortune, Rockefeller doubted that a nomination bought with his own money would be worth much politically. He also realized that since he could not break Nixon's lock on the party, he would have to fight Nixon in the primaries, where he would, in effect, be running against the policies of the most popular Republican president of the twentieth century.

Rockefeller Withdraws from the Race.

On 24 December Rockefeller announced that he would not run for president, calling his decision "definite and final." Rockefeller's withdrawal from the race gave Nixon time to polish his image as a statesman further before entering the postconvention political frays, but Nixon and his campaign advisers had looked forward to primary battles against Rockefeller as a means of generating public excitement, diverting some of the media attention from the hotly contested Democratic race and fine-tuning their strategy for the fall campaign.

A New Challenge from Rockefeller.

Nixon appeared to have the nomination locked up until the U-2 spying incident on 1 May and the resulting breakdown of the summit meeting between Eisenhower and Khrushchev sparked a Draft-Rockefeller movement. Between 1 June and 19 July, in a series of speeches and nine major documents, Rockefeller attacked the Republican leadership's handling of national affairs. Yet he treated the Democrats with disdain as well, and he was convinced that he must implement change through his own party.

The Nixon-Rockefeller Compromise.

Though Rockefeller's challenge did not seriously threaten Nixon's nomination it did raise the possibility of open dissent within the party that could provide ammunition for the Democrats. A few days before the convention opened in Chicago on 25 July, Rockefeller announced that the party platform was "seriously lacking in strength and specifics." Objecting most strenuously to the defense and civil rights planks, he threatened to take his fight for changes to the convention floor. Nixon, who wanted to avoid intraparty warfare on national television, flew to New York. He and Rockefeller met in the governor's Fifth Avenue apartment and hammered out a fourteen-point statement which became known as the Compact of Fifth Avenue.

Rumblings on the Right.

Nixon, who had basically accepted Rockefeller's positions, now faced two new battles, the first with the platform committee, whose views were far more conservative than those expressed in the Nixon-Rockefeller statement, and the second with an angry Eisenhower, vacationing in Newport, Rhode Island, before his appearance in Chicago. The president saw the part of the Compact of Fifth Avenue that dealt with national defense and diplomacy as a blatant attack on his competence. Despite such opposition, Nixon hammered through the civil rights plank on which he and Rockefeller agreed—calling for an end to discrimination in voting, housing, education, and jobs (one much like the Democrats')—and engineered a compromise defense plank acceptable to both Eisenhower and Rockefeller as well as the party regulars.

The Republican Convention.

Rockefeller withdrew from the presidential race, and on Wednesday, 27 July, Nixon won the Republican nomination on the first ballot with 1,321 votes to 10 for Sen. Barry Goldwater, a conservative Republican from Arizona, whose name was put into nomination by the Louisiana delegation to protest a civil rights plank that they said would hand their state to the Democrats as soon as Johnson came "across the border" to "talk 'magnolia'" to Louisiana voters. For his running mate, Nixon chose Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who had lost his Senate seat to Kennedy in 1952.

The Election Campaign

The Issues and the Rhetoric.

As in most campaigns the important political issues of 1960 became lost in rhetoric and personality issues. Both candidates called for a strong defense against communism. Kennedy stressed the missile gap between the United States and the Soviet Union and pointed to incidents such as the U-2 affair and the collapse of the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit to bolster his charge that the United States had lost international prestige. As he traveled the country he proclaimed over and over, "This is a great country. But I think it can be greater. I think we can do better. I think we can make this country move again." Defending Eisenhower's record and charging that Kennedy would be too soft on the Russians, Nixon made his campaign motto "Peace without Surrender." Kennedy scored points on the economy, warning that the United States was "slipping into its third recession in six years." As economic indicators increasingly seemed to support Kennedy's analysis, Nixon found it harder to convince voters that the downturn was temporary. In fact Nixon often appeared to be on the defensive, taking potshots at Kennedy rather than presenting his own programs. In contrast Kennedy captured voters' imaginations with his vision of a New Frontier in which public service and individual sacrifice would raise the United States to new heights of international prestige and harmony and prosperity at home.

A Close Race from the Start.

From the beginning both candidates believed the election would be close; in such cases even small tactical errors can mean the difference between winning and losing. In August a Gallup poll showed Nixon leading by 53 to 47 percent. The election seemed to be Nixon's to lose.

Nixon's Campaign Mistakes.

The strong civil rights plank that Nixon pushed through at the Republican National Convention did indeed express his personal convictions on the race issue. In supporting it he seemed to commit himself to courting black voters who made the difference between winning and losing in several key Northern cities. At first he seemed to write off the South, where the Republicans were beginning to make inroads; yet a tumultuous welcome in Atlanta in August seems to have convinced Nixon that he could win over white southern voters as well as blacks. In the end he alienated both blacks and Southern whites. Another Nixon mistake that proved crucial in a close election was the promise in his acceptance speech to campaign in all fifty states. Even after he was hospitalized for nearly two weeks in late August and early September with an infected knee, Nixon refused to go back on this promise, despite the urging of his campaign staff. Late in the race he found himself in Alaska, which had only three electoral votes, while Kennedy campaigned in New York and New England, where large numbers of electoral votes were up for grabs.

Nixon Ignores His Advisers.

Nixon often neglected to consult his campaign staff. He had excellent advisers and the funding for a first-rate campaign, but he was a loner by nature and tended to take too much on himself. The Nixon campaign strategy existed largely in the candidate's head; his decisions were often based on instinct, not on the advice of his political advisers. Kennedy, in contrast, was a team player. He and his advisers, headed by his brother Robert F. Kennedy, carefully mapped out their campaign strategy and followed it.

The Vice-presidential Candidates.

Another factor in the election was Kennedy's running mate, the folksy, dynamic, politically astute Lyndon Johnson, who was a better campaigner than Nixon's choice, the patrician Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, who was attractive and articulate but a leisurely campaigner.

Nixon and Kennedy Face Off on Television.

Yet Nixon's biggest mistake was agreeing to four televised debates with Kennedy. As the better known of the two candidates, Nixon needed the media exposure far less than Kennedy, but he had watched Kennedy's acceptance speech and was convinced that he could outdebate his Democratic opponent.

The First Debate.

At the first debate, on 26 September, Kennedy, who had spent the day practicing possible questions and answers with advisers, appeared calm and handsome; Nixon, who had spent the day alone, seemed tense and tired, even ill. Kennedy used the occasion to speak directly to the American people. Nixon rebutted or refuted portions of Kennedy's statement as if he were trying to score points from judges in a formal debate. Consequently, Nixon appeared to be picking at Kennedy's ideas rather than presenting his own.

Kennedy Scores High with Viewers.

According to one poll of television viewers, Kennedy outscored Nixon on the first, second, and fourth debates, while Nixon won the third. People who listened to the debates on the radio thought the two candidates came out about even. Of the 115 million to 120 million people who watched the debates, 57 percent said they had been influenced by them. Another 6 percent, about 4 million people, said their votes were based solely on the debates; 72 percent of these people, nearly 3 million, voted for Kennedy in an election where the gap between the two candidates in the popular vote was under 120,000. As Kennedy said a few days after the election, "It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide."

Kennedy Moves Ahead.

The forty-one-year-old Kennedy's performance in the debates laid to rest Republican charges that he was immature and inexperienced. His calm demeanor in these stressful situations put him on an equal footing with Nixon, whose image as a statesman was not enhanced by the debates. Kennedy moved ahead in the polls and stayed ahead, but he still faced obstacles.

Kennedy Faces the Religion Issue.

Kennedy hoped he had laid to rest the religion issue in West Virginia. In September Kennedy's Roman Catholicism became an issue again, as anti-Catholic pamphlets were widely circulated and some fundamentalist preachers began charging that Kennedy was the "Pope's puppet." Then the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, one of the most respected Protestant ministers in America, asked in a speech before a large gathering of Protestant clergyman if any Catholic could be a loyal president. Kennedy could ignore the problem no longer. Standing before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on 12 September, he delivered what some historians have called the most important speech of his campaign: "I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute," he said, "where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners how to vote.…" The speech impressed Sam Rayburn, who exclaimed, "By God …, he's eating 'em blood raw!" The next day, as parts of the speech were televised nationally, Nixon stated publicly that religion should not be an issue in the campaign. Kennedy's Catholicism, though not forgotten, ceased to be a major factor in the campaign. During the week before the election, when two Catholic bishops in Puerto Rico announced that it would be a sin to vote for a candidate they opposed, two prominent Catholics, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York and Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, immediately provided damage control, asserting that those bishops were wrong and reaffirming, in Cushing's words, "It is totally out of step for any ecclesiastical authority here to dictate the political voting of citizens." The influence of religion on the election results is difficult to ascertain. Kennedy seems to have been most hurt by his Catholicism in the South (most of which he won anyway) and several typically Republican midwestern states (which he expected to lose and did), but close to 80 percent of all Roman Catholics voted for him. (At that time 63 percent of Catholics voted Democratic in a typical election; only 51 percent voted for Stevenson in 1956.) Kennedy's net gain in the popular vote was small, but the Catholic vote helped Kennedy in several important, closely contested states, including New Jersey, Illinois, and Michigan.

The Black Vote Swings to Kennedy.

Another important constituency was black voters, who had asserted themselves for the first time in 1948, when they won the election for Truman. Eisenhower had made some inroads into this typically Democratic group in 1956, and the Republicans' civil rights plank seemed likely to help Nixon in 1960. Yet one event late in the campaign brought the black vote back to the Democratic fold. On 25 October a Georgia judge sentenced civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to four months at hard labor as punishment for violating his parole on a minor traffic conviction by participating in a sit-in at a restaurant in an Atlanta department store. Many, including his wife, believed that he would not emerge alive from the rural Georgia penitentiary where he was imprisoned. While Nixon and Eisenhower did nothing, Kennedy, who had been warned by at least two southern governors not to intrude, called Mrs. King to express his concern. The next day Robert Kennedy called the judge who had sentenced King, and John Kennedy secretly convinced the governor of Georgia to intercede. (Neither the candidate nor the governor wanted white southerners to know of their part in the negotiations—which was not revealed until years later.)

A Major Endorsement for Kennedy.

The civil rights leader was released, and his father, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., announced publicly that he was switching his vote from Nixon to Kennedy. Thousands of blacks followed, probably helped in their decision by the one million or so pamphlets about the King episode that Kennedy's chief civil rights adviser, Harris Wofford, had distributed outside black churches in key locations all over the country on the Sunday before the election. The black vote not only helped Kennedy in the North, but it also kept South Carolina from going Republican and played a decisive role in winning North Carolina and Texas for Kennedy as well.

An Election Too Close to Call.

Last-minute campaigning by Eisenhower caused an upswing for Nixon in the polls, but it was not enough to win the election. A record turnout, 64 percent of all registered voters, cast 49.7 percent for Kennedy and 49.5 percent for Nixon. Kennedy had a plurality of only 118,550 votes, but he took all but two of the states with large numbers of electoral votes, sometimes by the slimmest of margins. He ended up with 303 electoral votes, while Nixon took 219.

Charges of Voter Fraud.

Republicans questioned the vote counts in eight states; most prominently mentioned were Illinois, New Mexico, and Texas. Yet Nixon decided not to contest the election, telling his supporters that the battle would divide the country. In all likelihood it would also have failed to change the outcome of the election. In Illinois (27 electoral votes) it might well have been possible to find enough fraudulent votes created by Mayor Daley's political machine in Chicago to erase Kennedy's 8,858-vote lead in that state, and New Mexico (4 electoral votes), where Kennedy won by 2,294 votes, might also have been switched to the Republican column. Yet Kennedy would still have had 272 electoral votes, two more than he needed to win. Texas, with 24 electoral votes, could swing the election to Nixon, but Kennedy had won that state by 46,733 votes, a hard plurality to erase.

Kennedy Has No Coattails.

A victorious presidential candidate usually carries many of his party's candidates into office behind him. Yet the 1960 presidential election was so close that Kennedy's victory did little to help the Democrats, who had gained 15 new senators and 48 new congressmen in the 1958 elections and hoped to strengthen their control over both houses of Congress in 1960. Instead the Democrats lost two seats in the Senate and twenty in the House of Representatives. (In 1961 they lost another Senate seat when Republican John Tower of Texas was elected to fill Vice-president Johnson's seat, which had temporarily been filled by an appointed Democrat.) Though the Democrats maintained majorities in both houses, these losses effectively blocked Kennedy's domestic legislation for the first two years of his presidency. The Democrats' 263-174 majority in the House included 60-70 conservative southerners who were just as likely to vote with the Republicans as with their own party on domestic matters. The Democrats had a 64-36 majority in the Senate, but faced a similar situation there. Southern Democrats headed important Senate committees by virtue of the long tenure in office and had the power to block any legislation they considered too liberal.

Bright Spots for the Democrats.

All but one of the party's incumbent senators were reelected, including Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, who became Senate majority whip. The Democrats had one fewer governor than they had in 1958; segregationist Orval Faubus won an unprecedented fourth term in Arkansas, while Gov. Terry Sanford of North Carolina, who had gone against old-line southern Democrats with his early support for Kennedy, was also reelected.

Significant Republican Wins.

John V. Lindsay, who would be elected mayor of New York City in 1961, won a second term in the House. William W. Scranton of Pennsylvania, who would challenge Sen. Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, defeated the Democratic incumbent in a hotly contested Congressional race.

Sources:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 16 (1960);

Time, 76 (16 November 1960): 3-15;

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Atheneum, 1961).

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1964 ELECTIONS

The Republican Nomination Race

Republicans Fear Party Split.

By fall 1963 the Eastern Establishment Republicans who dominated their party at the national level began to fear that it would split in two if Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona went head-to-head for the Republican presidential nomination. For years the Eastern Establishment—the wealthy group of (mostly) Ivy League-educated international bankers and businessmen living mainly in and around New York—were willing to let the conservative Republicans of the Midwest and West speak for the party in Congress as long as the Establishment could control the presidential nomination, placing someone with moderate views consistent with their own in the position that created the party's national image. Rockefeller, one of the wealthiest men in America, was a member of the Establishment by virtue of heredity, education, and social class, but politically he was too liberal to inspire their trust. They found Goldwater, one of the west-of-the-Alleghenies Republicans they had tended to ignore, far too conservative. Yet in the search for a candidate to represent their mainstream Republican views the Establishment found itself leaderless. Former president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had spent most of his life as a soldier, was not experienced at party politics.

The Problem with Nixon.

Richard M. Nixon, who had vowed to leave politics after losing the election for governor of California in 1962, was blamed by many in both wings of the party for creating the mess in which they found themselves. They traced the first crack in the fragile bond that held the party together to the so-called Compact of Fifth Avenue, the policy statement by Nixon and Rockefeller that had enraged conservatives at the 1960 Republican National Convention. To these conservatives Nixon had sold out the party to appease Rockefeller, and many—including Goldwater—later charged that the strong civil rights plank resulting from that Nixon-Rockefeller agreement had lost the 1960 election for the Republicans.

Rockefeller Has an Early Lead.

Early in 1963 Rockefeller looked like the front-runner for the Republican nomination. President John F. Kennedy, who believed he would have lost the 1960 election if he had run against Rockefeller instead of Nixon, expected to face Rockefeller in 1964. But the equation changed in May 1963, after Rockefeller, who had been divorced from his first wife in 1961, married a divorced woman who had given up custody of her four children to her first husband. Before Rockefeller's remarriage Republicans had preferred him to Goldwater by 43 to 26 percent. In late May a Gallup poll showed that 35 percent of Republicans were for Goldwater, and only 30 percent wanted Rockefeller. With many in his party still undecided, Rockefeller reasoned that if he could make a strong showing in the primaries he could still win the nomination. He planned to battle Goldwater in three key primaries: New Hampshire (10 March 1964), Oregon (15 May), and California (2 June).

PRESIDENTIAL SUCCESSION

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the succession of Vice-president Lyndon B. Johnson to the presidency on 22 November 1963, Americans became concerned about the issue of presidential succession. For the next fourteen months—until the inauguration of Johnson and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, in January 1965—the vice-presidency remained vacant. Most Americans were shocked to learn that if Johnson, who had suffered a serious heart attack in 1955, died during 1964, John McCormack of Massachusetts, the seventy-three-year-old Speaker of the House of Representatives, would become president. Next in the line of succession was Carl Hayden of Arizona, the eighty-seven-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate. They were followed by members of the cabinet, listed in rank order beginning with the secretary of state.

Americans were also concerned about who was authorized to take over the president's duties if he were temporarily incapacitated, a situation that occurred twice in the 1950s when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was hospitalized. The U.S. Constitution had no provisions that defined the conditions under which a vice-president would become acting president.

To rectify both situations Congress approved an amendment to the U.S. Constitution on 6 July 1965. After ratification by the requisite three-fourths of the states, it became the Twenty-fifth Amendment on 10 February 1967. This amendment allowed the president to nominate a new vice-president, who would take office after approval by a majority vote in each house of Congress. It also added provisions governing temporary presidential disability, specifying the circumstances and provisions by which a vice-president would become acting president.

The disability provisions have never been applied. The provisions for naming a new vice-president have been invoked twice. In 1973 President Richard M. Nixon selected Rep. Gerald Ford to replace Spiro T. Agnew, who had resigned because of his connections to a bribery scandal while he had been governor of Maryland. After Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974 in the midst of the Watergate crisis, Ford became president and tapped Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York to be the new vice-president.

Source:

Vaughan Davis Bornet, The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983).

Goldwater Nearly Drops Out.

The assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 almost convinced Goldwater not to seek the Republican nomination. He and the president had liked each other, and Goldwater had viewed the 1964 presidential election as a perfect opportunity for them to debate the issues, giving voters a clear picture of the differences between Goldwater's conservative philosophy and Kennedy's liberal views. Though Kennedy was sure to win, Goldwater thought he could take the West and the South and claim a moral victory for the conservative cause. Against President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan, Goldwater could not count on the South, or even all the West. Yet he finally agreed to run because he feared the conservative cause would lose momentum if left leaderless.

Goldwater's Remarks Hurt Him.

Though he had been in the Senate since 1953, Goldwater was unprepared for the sort of attention the press pays to presidential candidates. Already known for his tendency to make often outrageous off-the-cuff statements, he made several well-thought-out policy speeches in New Hampshire, but reporters found better press in remarks that social-security payments should be made voluntary, that governments could start depressions but not end them, and that the United States should have dropped an atom bomb on North Vietnam ten years earlier. All these statements unnerved even conservative New Hampshire Republicans. Rockefeller's staff carefully recorded all such pronouncements and used them against the Arizona senator. Goldwater learned to consider his words carefully, but the damage was done.

A Dark Horse Wins in New Hampshire.

Rockefeller ruined Goldwater's chances in New Hampshire but failed to win the state for himself. New Hampshire Republicans found Rockefeller far too liberal and voted instead for a write-in candidate who had never set foot in the state: Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., Nixon's running mate in 1960, whom President Kennedy had appointed U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. Lodge won New Hampshire with 33,000 votes, followed by Goldwater (20,000), Rockefeller (19,500), and Nixon, also a write-in (15,600).

Goldwater Regroups.

Having hoped to win 40 percent of the New Hampshire vote and ending up with only 23 percent, Goldwater decided not to campaign in Oregon so that he could concentrate on California. Lodge's campaign was run by four political amateurs (one of whom was an expert in direct-mail advertising), and its success depended on signs of improvement in the Vietnam situation. The war got worse instead, and Rockefeller, who presented himself to Oregon Republicans as a responsible, mainstream candidate running to stop extremists from taking over the party, won the Oregon primary with 94,000 votes to 79,000 for Lodge and 50,000 for Goldwater.

Rockefeller Gains Momentum.

After Oregon the Lodge campaign threw its support to Rockefeller, whose Oregon victory gave him the momentum to surge ahead of Goldwater in polls of California Republicans, but Goldwater's campaign organized an army of thousands of volunteers (9,500 in Los Angeles County alone) to go door to door and get out the vote for their candidate. Goldwater beat Rockefeller in California with 51.6 percent of the vote.

Clif White Steals the Party for Goldwater.

Well before the primaries, F. Clifton White, a conservative Republican from upstate New York, had set in motion a plan that would change the face of the Republican Party for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. Having earlier engineered a conservative takeover of the Young Republicans, he had his own national network that could work at the grassroots level in nonprimary states to seize control of the Republican Party for Goldwater. White's basic strategy was to get large numbers of conservatives to attend their local precinct meetings, thus flooding with Goldwater supporters the pool from which national convention delegates would eventually be elected. By late May Goldwater had 300 of the 655 votes he needed for the nomination. Less than two weeks after the California primary he had 588, and White was confident of delivering 200 more votes to Goldwater.

The Establishment Waits Too Long.

The main-stream wing of the party controlled by the Eastern Establishment woke up to what was going on just before the California primary. Unwilling to support Rockefeller actively, they sat back and waited for him to win on his own, confident that Rockefeller would win in California, leaving Goldwater without the necessary votes to win the nomination but with enough convention votes to veto Rockefeller's candidacy. Then, they thought, the moderate, mainstream Republicans could choose their own "unity candidate."

Eisenhower Picks Scranton.

Goldwater destroyed their strategy by winning the California primary, and the moderates began seeking alternatives. Eisenhower—wanting to remain publicly neutral—urged Gov. William W. Scranton of Pennsylvania to run but stopped short of publicly endorsing him. Scranton, who felt he needed Eisenhower's endorsement to have a chance, wavered for several days. Finally, Eisenhower—who was proud of having been the first modern president to get a civil rights bill through Congress—became enraged when he saw that Goldwater was about to vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and convinced the equally angry Scranton to run (still without Eisenhower's public endorsement). On 11 June Scranton began an expensive five-week campaign that was doomed from the start.

The Republican Convention.

The Republican National Convention held in San Francisco on 13-16 July 1964 marked a pivotal point in Republican party history. Rallying behind Goldwater, conservatives had wrested the party away from the mainstream Republicans who had controlled the party at the national level since 1940. The repercussions of this takeover would be felt in American politics for at least the next thirty years.

Last-Ditch Efforts to Defeat Goldwater.

Goldwater arrived at the convention with more than enough delegates to be nominated on the first ballot. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Governors Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York and William W. Scranton of Pennsylvania, all of whom had unsuccessfully battled Goldwater in the race for delegates, now joined with other mainstream Republicans, such as Gov. George W. Romney of Michigan, Senators Jacob K. Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, Sen. Clifford P, Case of New Jersey, and Sen. Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, in a last-minute attempt to find some way to derail Goldwater. They decided to challenge the platform as it was presented on the convention floor by the conservative-dominated platform committee. If they could convince delegates to go along with their platform amendments, they reasoned, they could demonstrate that Goldwater's support was not as strong as it seemed, and then they might be able to shake loose enough votes to deny Goldwater his first-ballot victory. But Goldwater's people stood firm. On prime-time television, as Rockefeller stood before the convention to defend a proposed resolution condemning extremist groups—mentioning by name the Communist Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society—Goldwater supporters in the galleries jeered and booed and chanted "We want Barry!"—virtually drowning out Rockefeller. Following Goldwater's instruction, his delegates on the floor were relatively quiet, and his people finally managed to squelch the uproar in the galleries. Yet millions of television viewers came away with the impression that Goldwater supporters were rabid right-wing extremists, and that image would linger in the minds of many voters.

Goldwater Has the Convention Locked Up.

All minority platform proposals were handily defeated, and Goldwater won the nomination easily on the first ballot. His choice of running mate, Congressman William E. Miller, an archconservative from upstate New York, offered no possibility of conciliation with party moderates, nor did Goldwater's acceptance speech, which ended with the ringing pronouncement "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!… Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" (Goldwater's italics). On hearing these words Senator Keating and forty other members of the New York delegation walked out of the convention.

The Democratic Nomination Race

Johnson Dominates the Polls.

President Johnson was content to let the Republicans' battles dominate the political news during primary season, as poll after poll showed that voters, even many Republicans, preferred him to either Governor Rockefeller or Senator Goldwater—the two most likely Republican candidates. In June, when it became clear that Goldwater had the Republican nomination sewn up, a Gallup poll showed that 81 percent of registered voters would vote for Johnson over Goldwater. Even staunch Republican businessmen, such as Henry Ford II, were expressing support for Johnson.

Johnson Demonstrates Leadership.

Since the assassination of President Kennedy and Vice-president Johnson's assumption of the presidency on 22 November 1963, Johnson had stressed continuity with the Kennedy administration. Calling on Congress to fulfill the Kennedy legacy (and calling in the political lOUs he had amassed during his years in the Senate), Johnson used his extraordinary political skills to guide through both houses of Congress the major items on Kennedy's agenda, including a tax cut, War on Poverty legislation, and the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. This performance did much to enhance Johnson's stature as a national leader and—as he had planned—allowed him to remain above the fray of partisan politics.

A Challenge from Wallace.

The president was challenged briefly from the right wing of his own party when Gov, George C. Wallace of Alabama entered a few primaries, hoping to demonstrate nationwide opposition to the Civil Rights Bill then in the Senate. Wallace won 34 percent of the votes cast in the Wisconsin Democratic primary (7 April), 29.8 percent in Indiana (5 May), and 42.7 percent in Maryland (19 May). Many of the votes in Wisconsin and Indiana came from Republican crossovers, suggesting that Wallace could hurt both candidates. Wallace announced that he would run for president as a third-party candidate. His fellow southern conservatives, however, were afraid Wallace and Goldwater would cancel out one another in the South, and they thought Goldwater had a better shot at beating Johnson. On 19 July, after a personal appeal from Goldwater, Wallace withdrew from the presidential race.

Johnson Vetoes Kennedy.

There was strong public sentiment favoring the choice of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as Johnson's running mate, but Johnson, who was attempting to emerge from the shadow cast by one Kennedy, was not anxious to risk eclipse from another, who was perceived by many as the standard-bearer for his brother's vision of the New Frontier. Furthermore, while President Kennedy had established a good working relationship with his vice-president, Robert Kennedy and other members of the Kennedy administration had treated Johnson with barely disguised disdain and failed to seek his advice even when his superior in-sight on legislative matters could have been extremely useful to them. A proud man, who made a practice of always repaying friends and enemies in kind, Johnson told Kennedy privately that he would not be the vice-presidential candidate. Then, to make the decision seem like a matter of policy rather than personality, Johnson announced that no one in his cabinet would be considered for the vice-presidency.

Johnson Taps Humphrey.

Johnson's choice for his running mate was Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. As Senate majority whip, Humphrey, who had been a champion of civil rights since 1948, had played a crucial role in shepherding the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 through the Senate. If the election had shown signs of being close, Johnson might have thought twice about sharing the ticket with a politician as liberal as Humphrey, but Goldwater was so far behind in the polls that Johnson could afford the risk of offending conservative Democrats, especially in the South.

The Democratic Convention.

The major events at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, began to unfold just before the convention officially convened on 24 August. To dramatize the plight of southern blacks who tried to register to vote, Robert Moses, head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter-registration program in Mississippi, had organized the Freedom Democratic Party, which elected its own integrated convention delegation to challenge the credentials of the delegation sent by the regular Mississippi Democratic Party, which excluded blacks. One after another black Freedom Democrats testified to the credentials committee about the violence inflicted on them by Mississippi law officers as punishment for their legal attempts to register to vote. Johnson believed that compromise was possible, but the regular Mississippi Democrats, who stressed that their election was strictly legal, and the Freedom Democrats, who emphasized with equal fervor that morality was on their side, were totally unwilling to make concessions. The committee's decision angered both sides. It stated that no regular Mississippi delegate could be seated without first pledging to support the Democratic ticket, that two Freedom Democrats would be seated as delegates at large with full voting privileges, and that beginning in 1968 the national convention would not seat delegations from states where the party excluded citizens and deprived them of their voting rights solely on the basis of race or color. When this compromise was read aloud to the convention, Freedom Democrats swarmed onto the convention floor and took over the seats assigned to the Mississippi delegation. By the time they were ousted three hours later, the regular Mississippi and Alabama delegations had walked out. The rest of the convention was uneventful. With Johnson's nomination a foregone conclusion, not even his attempts to keep the nation guessing about his choice of a running mate could generate much drama.

The Presidential Campaign

Johnson and Goldwater's Secret Agreement.

Two events of the summer of 1964 were major factors in shaping American history for the rest of the decade and beyond: on 2 July President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and on 5 August Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which later led to escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. Yet neither race nor the war was an issue in the 1964 election campaign. On 24 July the Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson met secretly and agreed not to use the war or civil rights as major campaign issues. With a relatively small number of American troops in Southeast Asia, the American public was far more focused on the Cold War with the Soviet Union than on events in Vietnam. Yet, as Goldwater pointed out, opposition to American involvement there was growing and had the potential to divide the nation.

The Race Issue.

Alabama governor George Wallace's strong showing in several primaries had demonstrated the existence of a white backlash against black Americans' strides toward racial equality, and the race riots in New York and several other northern cities during July 1964 tended to reinforce the fears of some conservative whites. Goldwater might have used the white backlash to his advantage, especially in the South, but whether he did so or not Johnson might have labeled him a racist because of his vote against the Civil Rights Bill.

Johnson's Great Society.

Johnson based much of his campaign on his concept of the Great Society, which he first outlined in his 22 May 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan. Speaking in an unprecedented period of American prosperity, he called for "an end to poverty and injustice," the enhancement of educational opportunities for all Americans, the renewal of the nation's natural beauty, and the recognition of "creation for its own sake," Yet Goldwater had provided the Johnson campaign with so much ammunition that Johnson spent little time describing specific programs.

Johnson Turns Goldwater's Words Against Him.

Using Goldwater's own statements, the Democrats portrayed him as trigger happy with nuclear weapons. ("Let's lob one into the Kremlin men's room," was a frequently quoted Goldwater statement.) Johnson presented himself as the peace candidate, while his supporters amended a memorable and clever Goldwater slogan—"In your heart you know he's right"—to "In your heart you know he might." On domestic issues Goldwater needed little help from the Democrats to alienate voters. The same principled objection to the expansion of federal government that had led him to vote against the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 resulted in speeches against farm subsidies to a group of farmers, against Medicare to retirees in Florida, against poverty programs to West Virginians, against the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville. At each campaign stop Goldwater seemed to alienate another group of American voters.

Johnson Wins Big.

In the end Johnson won the election with 61.2 percent of the popular vote. Goldwater won his home state of Arizona and five southern states—Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Georgia. Helped by the black vote in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas, Johnson took the remainder of the South and the rest of the nation, winning 486 electoral votes to Goldwater's 52. Johnson's coattails created large Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate—as well as at the state level—causing many political commentators to ask if the Republican party could survive.

Republican Losses in Congress.

The Johnson land-slide helped the Democrats, who had a net gain of 38 seats in the House of Representatives. The Democrats' 153-seat majority was their largest since their party's sweep in the 1936 election. The conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats was seriously damaged by the defeats of forty-two northern Republicans. GOP victories over seven southern Democrats replaced conservatives with conservatives and strengthened the influence of liberal Democrats in the Democratic Caucus. In both houses the Republicans who survived were moderates who managed to disassociate themselves from Goldwater. No congressman who voted for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was defeated; eleven of the twenty-one northern Republicans who voted against it lost.

Democrats Supplement Their Senate Majority.

Democrats held twenty-six of the thirty-five Senate seats up for reelection in 1964 and won twenty-eight of them, giving their party its largest Senate majority since 1940. Republicans had been especially hoping to win back some of the thirteen seats taken from them by liberal Democrats in 1958, causing a major realignment of power in the Senate, but all eleven remaining members of the "Class of 1958" were reelected, including Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut, Philip A. Hart of Michigan, R. Vance Hartke of Indiana, Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota, and Edmund S. Muskie of Maine. Newcomers to the Senate included Democrats Robert F. Kennedy of New York and Joseph D. Tydings of Maryland.

Governorships.

Republicans won in only eight of the twenty-five states where gubernatorial elections were held in 1964, taking three governorships away from Democrats but losing two others. Republicans John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, John A. Volpe of Massachusetts, and George W. Romney of Michigan avoided backing Goldwater, whose endorsement would have most likely spelled defeat for them. All eight states that elected Republican governors gave their electoral votes to Johnson in the presidential race.

Sources:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 20(1964);

Time, 84 (13 November 1964): 3-43;

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1964 (New York: Atheneum, 1965).

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1980 ELECTIONS

A Nation in Turmoil

The 1980 presidential campaign was waged against a backdrop of national insecurity. The United States had emerged from World War II as the most prosperous and powerful nation on earth. Three and a half decades later the United States no longer dominated the world economy, nor did it have a military edge on the Soviet Union, whose conventional forces were superior in number and whose stockpile of strategic nuclear weapons had grown to at least equal that of the United States. Despite fears created by the erosion of their country's international standing, Americans were most concerned with pocketbook issues: high unemployment, soaring interest rates, and double-digit inflation.

The Energy Debate: Carter

After the severe gasoline shortage of 1979 Americans had become painfully aware of how closely their economic woes were connected the their nation's dependence on foreign oil. They were also beginning to realize that any possible solution to the problem would cost them money. By the time the 1980 presidential campaign got underway, part of President Carter's energy plan was already in place and working. In April 1979 he had announced a gradual phasing out of government controls on the price of domestic crude oil, a measure designed to limit consumption by raising consumer prices. The following July he proposed a windfall-profits tax to fund research on alternative energy sources such as solar power and synthetic fuels, which passed Congress and reached the president's desk in April 1980. A separate bill proposed the creation of the Energy Security Corporation (ESC) to allocate the income from this tax. This bill passed in June 1980, after heavy opposition from Ronald Reagan and congressional Republicans, who saw the ESC as a major extension of federal power into yet another area previously reserved for private enterprise. Another element of Carter's plan—an Energy Mobilization Board (EMB) to cut through red tape blocking "construction of needed energy facilities"—failed to pass Congress, in part because Reagan and his congressional allies opposed it as still more encroachment of "big government" and in part because many environmentalists feared that the "red tape" the board was intended to cut through would include important environmental protection laws. By mid 1980 Carter could point to several successful results of his program: the United States had cut its importation of foreign oil by one million barrels a day; there was more exploration for domestic oil than ever before in the nation's history; and the use of solar energy had soared. Yet some critics questioned the long-term effectiveness of the program, and Carter had managed to anger both the environmentalists and the conservatives.

The Energy Debate: Reagan

While Carter stressed the limits of the world's resources of fossil fuels, his Republican opponent refused to acknowledge that such limits existed. Reagan called for "more domestic production of oil and gas" and "greater use of nuclear power within strict safety standards." While Carter sought cooperation between the private and public sectors, Reagan believed that the American oil companies could solve the energy crisis essentially by themselves. Instead of creating new agencies, he proposed to eliminate the Department of Energy. At the same time he said he would rapidly decontrol oil and natural gas prices, ease environmental regulations, and use federal funds for oil exploration. While rejecting "unequivocally punitive gasoline and other energy taxes designed to artificially suppress domestic consumption," he called for higher oil and natural gas prices, with the resulting oil company profits to be spent on exploration for new natural resources.

The Energy Debate: Anderson

Independent candidate John Anderson, who made the energy issue the major thrust of his campaign, offered a plan that also meant higher gasoline prices. He argued that a fifty-cent per gallon tax could reduce gasoline consumption by more than one million barrels a day. Unlike his opponents he called for returning the extra money spent on gasoline directly to the American people, by using the proceeds from this tax to decrease payroll taxes and raise Social Security benefits.

Inflation

The Republican platform called inflation "the greatest domestic threat facing our nation today," and most Americans agreed. The GOP blamed the problem on big government, high taxation, and ever-increasing government spending. The solution—according to Reagan—was a downsizing of the federal government, elimination of government regulations that limited the growth of private industry, balancing the budget, and cutting taxes, both for individuals and businesses. These proposals, more populist than Republican, cast Reagan as the classic outsider waging battle against the Washington establishment—the tactic Carter had used in 1976. The Democrats borrowed Bush's label, "voodoo economics," to denigrate Reagan's economic plan. Carter preached austerity as the only way out of the wage-price spiral, offering only a small tax cut to offset a 1981 Social Security tax increase. He blamed much of the increase in inflation on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and promised that reducing American oil imports would lower inflation as well. He reiterated his party's stand against a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget (which the Republicans favored), while supporting fiscally responsible spending to get the federal government gradually out of debt. At the same time, he distanced himself from Democratic liberals who called for more federal programs to control the wage-price spiral.

Voting for Change

In autumn 1980 most American voters found themselves trying to choose among candidates for whom they felt little enthusiasm. During primary season Reagan's opposition to the ERA and his can for a constitutional ban on abortion had solidified his support from the religious Right and other conservatives. In the fall he could afford to appeal to a broader range of voters with slogans such as "Together, A New Beginning" and "For a Change." (In fact he did little to fulfill his abortion-amendment promise during his eight-year presidency, and the ERA failed without any concerted effort on his part.) Reagan concentrated on attacking Carter's handling of the economy and his foreign-policy failures. From his self-imposed imprisonment in the White House, Carter found himself waging a negative and defensive campaign—attacking Reagan as "simplistic" and "not equipped to be President," while defending himself against Reagan's charges. The president's campaign staff did little to focus public attention on their candidate's accomplishments in human rights and energy policy, or his foreign-policy successes, which included the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel, the Panama Canal treaty, and the normalization of relations with mainland China.

The Public-Relations Seesaw

In the early weeks of the presidential campaign Carter forged ahead. In mid September a CBS News/New York Times poll asked Americans if each of the two major candidates "understands the complicated problems a President has to deal with." Sixty-eight percent thought Carter did, while only 48 percent could say the same for Reagan. Yet by late September Reagan's rating on the same question had risen to 62 percent while Carter's remained the same. The main reason for the increase in Reagan's rating was his 21 September televised debate with Anderson. Because Anderson was in direct competition with Carter for liberal votes, the Carter campaign realized that their candidate had more to lose than to gain from a three-way debate with Reagan and Anderson, and they refused to have Carter participate, hoping his absence would make the debate seem unimportant. While ratings were undoubtedly lower than they would have been if Carter had taken part, Reagan was able to use the occasion to his advantage. Displaying the style that would earn him the sobriquet "The Great Communicator," Reagan presented his views in a moderate manner, dispelling many doubts about competence and accusations of extremism. Before the debate he was 4 percent behind Carter in opinion polls. Afterward he was 5 percentage points ahead. The Democrats intensified their attacks on Reagan, charging that he was not to be trusted with nuclear weapons and a threat to the social fabric of the United States. Carter called the election "a choice between peace and war" and said Reagan might well separate the American people into black versus white, Jew versus Gentile, North versus South, and rural versus urban. Reagan countered such attacks calmly, and the press called them "vindictive." Yet while to some extent they backfired, Reagan's competence rating dropped to 51 percent in mid October while Carter's rose to 70 percent. During the same period the president had been working hard and with apparent success at putting together the traditional Democratic coalition of liberals, labor, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and southerners—and he seemed to be making headway toward a deal to bring the hostages home from Iran. As election day neared he had a narrow lead. Then he agreed to debate Reagan.

The Debate

Although his advisers believed that a debate at that point in the campaign "could only hurt us," Carter agreed to face Reagan on national television a week before the election. Carter presented his views well but failed to make Reagan look like a dangerous extremist, and the Republican nominee once again used his superior communication skills to convey an image of competency and reasonableness. Overall the debate was judged a draw. Few voters shifted their allegiance as a result of the debate, but Reagan convinced many undecided voters that he was capable of handling the presidency, and he moved ahead in the polls. The final blow for Carter came the weekend before the election, when the Iranians issued a new set of demands in the hostage negotiations, ending Democratic hopes for having them

free by election day. Instead of spending the last days before the election campaigning, Carter rushed back to the White House to deal with the crisis.

Election Results

Reagan won the 4 November election in a landslide, with 51.6 percent of the popular vote to 41.7 for Carter and 6.7 for Anderson. Reagan won forty-four of fifty states for 489 electoral votes to 49 for Carter and none for Anderson. Voter turnout, which had been progressively declining since 1960, was 52.6 percent, the lowest turnout since 1948. Many voters had expressed their dislike for all the candidates by staying home; more of them were potential Carter voters than possible voters for Reagan, proving once again the traditional rule that Democrats win elections with large voter turnouts and that Republicans win those with small turn-outs. Early analysis suggested that by taking 9 percent of the vote in the East—to 43 percent for Carter and 47 percent for Reagan—Anderson allowed Reagan to sweep the region, where Carter might otherwise have taken vote-rich states such as New York, with 41 electoral votes, and Massachusetts, with 14. Yet subsequent surveys of Anderson voters showed that they were essentially voting against Carter. If Anderson had not been in the race, they would have been as likely to have stayed home or voted for Reagan as they would have voted for Carter. In fact much of the electorate voted against one candidate or the other, and on election day nearly two-fifths of those who voted for Reagan did so only because they believed "it was time for a change."

No Conservative Mandate

Reagan cut heavily into the Democratic coalition, especially among labor and Jews, where Carter won, but just barely, and in the South, where all but Carter's home state of Georgia voted for Reagan. Carter got 80 percent of the black vote, but fewer blacks voted than in 1976, and the liberal vote was also down from that election. Overall the Reagan landslide was much more an expression of voter dissatisfaction than a sign of an emerging conservative coalition in American politics.

The Republicans Gain Control of the Senate

Reagan's coattails carried in sixteen new Republican senators, giving the GOP a 53-47 majority in the Senate, the largest Republican majority since the Seventy-first Congress of 1929-1931, when the party had 56 seats. (Sen. Harry F. Byrd Jr. of Virginia, an Independent, is here counted as a Democrat because he chose to caucus with that party.) Among the Republican newcomers elected to replace Democratic incumbents were Steven D. Symms of Idaho, who defeated Vietnam War opponent Frank Church; J. Danforth Quayle of Indiana, who triumphed over liberal Birch Bayh; Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, whose opponent, John A. Durkin, had strong labor backing; James Abdnor of South Dakota, who won over the liberal 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern by a wide margin; Slade Gorton of Washington State, who ousted New Deal Democrat Warren G. Magnuson; and Robert W. Kasten Jr. of Wisconsin, who beat another liberal stalwart, Gaylord Nelson. Another liberal who would be missing from the Ninety-seventh Congress was Republican Jacob Javits, defeated in his party primary by conservative Alfonse M. D'Amato, who went on to easily defeat his Democratic opponent. Another new Republican face was Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, elected to replace retiring Republican Richard S. Schweiker.

Democrats Hold on to the House

The Democrats suffered a net loss of 33 seats in the House of Representatives, but ended up with a 51-seat edge on the Republicans. Prognosticators wondered how real this slim Democratic majority would be on issues where conservative Democrats tended to vote with Republicans. Thirty-one of 392 incumbents running for reelection were defeated; 27 of the losers were Democrats, including 5 of 6 House members awaiting trial in the Abscam bribery scandal.

Governorships

While the Democrats maintained a lead in governorships, with twenty-seven statehouses in the Democratic column, the Republicans picked up the governorships of Arkansas, Missouri, North Dakota, and Washington State—for a total of twenty-three. One Democratic governor considered a future presidential contender, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, was reelected, but another, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, was defeated by Republican Frank D. White.

Sources:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 36 (1980);

Gerald M. Pomper, Ross K. Baker, Kathleen A. Frankovic, Charles E. Jacob, Wilson Carey McWilliams, and Henry Plotkin, The Election of 1980: Reports and Interpretations (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1981).

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1988 ELECTIONS

The Willie Horton Issue

When they first heard that George Bush was planning to go after Dukakis on the crime issue, the Dukakis campaign was incredulous. The crime rate in Massachusetts had gone down markedly during Dukakis's governorship, and they believed that the Republicans' strategy would have little effect on their candidate's chances. They severely underestimated the abilities of Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who created in the minds of the public such a strong association between Dukakis and a convicted murder named Willie Horton that the crime issue became the single biggest factor in Dukakis's loss of the election. Under Dukakis's predecessor Massachusetts prisons had begun giving weekend furloughs to prison inmates with records of good behavior. Most states had similar programs (including California during Reagan's governorship), as did the federal prisons, and Dukakis allowed the Massachusetts prisoner furloughs to continue. Unfortunately a black man named Willie Horton, who had been convicted of first-degree murder, was given a weekend furlough and escaped to Maryland, where he raped a white woman and stabbed her fiancé. Dukakis immediately made first-degree murderers ineligible for the program, but the Republicans already had all the ammunition they needed.

Negative Campaigning

Speech after speech at the Republican National Convention used Horton's name or the Massachusetts furlough program as symbols of Dukakis's softness on criminals, with Sen. Pete Wilson charging that Dukakis's challenge to prisoners was not "'Make my day,' but 'Have a nice weekend.' " But the real damage was inflicted during the election campaign, with a series of Bush adds attacking Dukakis on the prison furlough issue. One showed prisoners going in and out revolving prison doors while a voice-over said Dukakis allowed even murderers sentenced to life without parole to take part in the furlough program and that many prisoners had escaped while free on weekend passes. Later groups not officially connected to the Bush campaign also ran television ads focusing on this issue. One such ad featured Horton's Maryland victims. Critics called the ads unfair and distortions of the truth and charged the Bush campaign of pandering to the deepest racist sentiments of white Americans. Dukakis and his advisers

failed to realize until too late how much damage the so-called Horton ads had done. Dukakis was a cautious, seemingly unemotional man who vowed at the start to avoid negative campaigning. Faced with hostile attacks from the opposing camp, his first response was to ignore them as beneath notice—despite warnings from Democrats who had been subjects of Republican negative campaigning in 1980 and 1982 that voters tended to believe accusations that were not aggressively refuted.

The Pledge of Allegiance

While pinning Horton on Dukakis, Republican campaign strategists also managed to pin to their own candidate one of the most powerful symbols of American patriotism: the Pledge of Allegiance. As governor of Massachusetts Dukakis had vetoed a bill that required teachers to lead their students in reciting the pledge, explaining that the bill was un-constitutional because it violated teachers' first amendment guarantees of freedom of expression. Implying that Dukakis had banned the pledge outright, Bush frequently told campaign audiences, "I believe that our schoolchildren should have the right to say the Pledge of Allegiance.…I don't know what his problem is." Thinking like the lawyer that he is, Dukakis looked at this issue from a strictly legal standpoint and suggested that if Bush did not recognize the unconstitutionality of the bill Dukakis had vetoed, the Republican candidate would not be a good president. Again Dukakis failed to recognize the emotional subtext of Bush's accusation. In poll after poll, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, a powerful symbol of patriotism and national unity, has repeatedly achieved high approval ratings. Republican campaign strategists so successfully identified their candidate with the "right" side of that issue and so adeptly tied Dukakis to a convicted murderer and rapist that by election day large numbers of voters were choosing not between Dukakis and Bush but between Willie Horton and the Pledge of Allegiance. As Robert Strauss, former Democratic national chairman, commented, "Dukakis made a major mistake." By getting into a constitutional debate involving the Pledge of Allegiance, "He captured the hearts of seventeen lawyers and lost three million voters" (Christian Science Monitor, 21 September 1988).

The Debates

Dukakis had similar problems in the presidential debates, which he tackled with all the skill of a formal debater and none of the emotion of a partisan politician. He went into the first debate on 25 September determined to reclaim his image as a moderate and scored points by proposing specific programs to attack drug abuse, shortages of adequate housing, rising health-care costs, and the difficulty of obtaining affordable health insurance—all issues that concerned Americans deeply. Bush called a Dukakis plan to require employers to provide health insurance for their employees too expensive for businesses and stressed law-and-order issues, while charging Dukakis with liberalism. Most commentators agreed that Dukakis won the debate on points, but as in previous presidential elections, few voters actually chose their candidate on the basis of the issues discussed in debates, and he had come across as too serious, his face frequently wearing an expression that reporters had started to call his "eat your peas" look. With the Republicans fully in possession of the momentum, waging a tough, effective, focused campaign while Dukakis's inexperienced staff floundered in an uncoordinated effort to provide a coherent package for their candidate's message, Dukakis needed not just a decisive victory in the second debate (13 October) but a victory in which he managed to reach voters on an emotional level, to reveal something about his character. He lost the debate on the first question. When asked if he would still oppose the death penalty if his own wife were raped and murdered, Dukakis calmly answered that, yes, he would still be against it—passing up the opportunity to express the sort of revulsion for violent crime that the Republicans had been using to their advantage, while also speaking of the moral issue of grounding the rule of law in humanity rather than vengeance. He tried hard to seem warmer in this debate, but by the end of the evening the media had decided the election race was over. The main question seemed to be Bush's margin of victory.

Another Republican Victory

On 8 November Bush won forty states with 53.4 percent of the popular vote to 45.6 percent for Dukakis, who had the small consolation of having done better against Bush than his two immediate predecessors had done against Reagan. Bush swept the South, much of the Farm Belt, the Rocky Mountain states, and every heavily populated state except New York, ending up with 426 electoral votes to 112 for Dukakis. Voter turnout dropped to 50.1 percent, a decline attributed in part to lack of charisma in either candidate and in part to a disaffection for the political process caused by the negativity of the campaigns. Democrats could take heart that Dukakis had won back from the Republicans blue-collar workers, individuals without college educations, and people who earned less than the median family income of $30,000 a year—essential elements of the Democratic coalition that Reagan had won in 1984. In fact more than half of the Reagan Democrats returned to the party in 1988, and Bush ran about five percentage points lower than Reagan in every demographic group. Yet the election also taught the Democrats an important lesson: with declining union membership, the defection of white southerners to the Republicans, and the slow erosion of the working-class Catholic vote, the Democrats had to find a way to attract new voters to replace their losses from the New Deal coalition forged by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. While no one was ready to declare that coalition dead, politicians of the 1980s had witnessed the gradual dissolution of the glue that held it together.

Congressional Elections

Despite Bush's decisive victory, Democrats maintained their majorities in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Yet with no significant gains in either house and the loss of the presidential election for the third time in a row, there was little celebration among Democrats. Voters continued to favor incumbents. In the Senate only one Democratic and three Republican incumbents were defeated. In the House the Republicans lost four incumbents, and the Democrats lost two. The election of Republican Trent Lott in Mississippi and Connie Mack in Florida to fill Senate seats vacated by the retirements of two powerful Democrats, John C. Stennis and Lawton Chiles, was interpreted as evidence of the GOP's increasing hold on the South. Democratic newcomers to the Senate included Charles S. Robb of Virginia and Robert Kerrey of Nebraska, both considered possible presidential candidates for the 1990s.

Governorships

Twelve gubernatorial elections were held in 1988, and eight of nine incumbents were reelected. The one exception was Republican Arch A. Moore Jr. of West Virginia, who was replaced by Democrat Gaston Caperton. Democrats were also pleased by the election of Evan Bayh in Vice President Dan Quayle's home state of Indiana, ending twenty years of Republican control of the governorship in that state. Republicans celebrated the election of Stan Stephens to replace a retiring Democrat in Montana and Judd Gregg's victory in New Hampshire, where he replaced fellow Republican John Sununu, who became President George Bush's chief of staff.

Sources:

Sidney Blumenthal, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War (New York: HarperCollins, 1990);

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 44 (1988);

Gerald M. Pomper, Ross K. Baker, Walter Dean Burnha, Barbara G. Farah, Marjorie Randon Hershey, Ethel Klien, and Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Election of 1988: Reports and Interpretations (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1988);

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1984 ELECTIONS

Conservative versus Liberal

The 1984 presidential election was unusual in the annals of American politics because the two major-party candidates represented diametrically opposing ideologies. American voters have traditionally preferred middle-of-the-road candidates, and not since Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater exactly twenty years earlier had a liberal, New Deal Democrat gone up against a truly conservative Republican. In 1984 the results were reversed, with Ronald Reagan winning a second term by decisively defeating Walter Mondale. Reagan had clearly moved the nation to the right during his first term, but his election was widely interpreted as a victory for Reagan the man rather than his conservative policies.

Blurring Political Distinctions

During the campaign each candidate tried to appeal to the broadest possible range of voters by portraying himself as a moderate and his opponent as a dangerous extremist. Despite jokes about his inability to discuss important issues without cue cards and stones about his nodding off during cabinet meetings, Reagan was helped by his likable personality and his ability to project an image of leadership. Even his supporters conceded that Mondale was boring. According to one campaign joke, Reagan might fall asleep during his cabinet meetings, but if Mondale were elected he would put the whole cabinet to sleep.

The Debates

Reagan led Mondale in most polls for all 1984, with the Democratic challenger making significant inroads in the incumbent's level of support only twice: immediately after the Democratic National Convention and after the first televised debate (7 October). In that debate Mondale politely and effectively attacked the president's policy decisions and raised the issue of his competence. Reagan's statements seemed increasingly muddled, and in his closing comments he admitted to being "confused." The media was immediately flooded with questions about whether the oldest president in U.S. history was in fact too old to hold that office. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal observed that his "debate performance invites open speculation on his ability to serve" (9 October). Mondale performed ably, though less spectacularly, in the second debate (21 October), but Reagan came back strong, managing to convince most viewers that he was indeed of sound mind and competent to be president. He also cracked a joke: "I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." While 75 percent of the people who said they made up their minds on the basis of the debates chose Mondale, only 10 percent of those who cast votes on election day picked their candidate in that way. Most people had made up their minds months ago. Those undecided voters who joined the Mondale camp after the first debate would have probably ended up there by election day anyway. The second debate shored up Reagan's commanding lead.

Election Results. On 6 November Reagan won 58.8 percent of the votes cast by nearly 93 million Americans, 55.3 percent of eligible voters. The turnout was disappointing to Democrats, who had hoped for 100 million on the long-held theory that the bigger the turnout the more votes for Democrats, but the vote was big enough to end a twenty-year decline in voter turnout, which had dropped to 52.6 percent in 1980. Mondale, who got 40.6 percent of the popular vote, won only the District of Columbia and his home state of Minnesota. He wound up with 13 electoral votes to 525 for Reagan. There was widespread speculation about the demise of the New Deal Democratic coalition and the emergence of a new conservative Republican coalition, but later analysis proved both predictions premature. Parts of the New Deal coalition were still evident: Mondale had won the majority of votes cast by unemployed, low-income, and union families. He had also beaten Reagan among African American, Hispanic, Jewish, and urban voters. Yet Reagan had once again attracted away two key elements of that coalition: Catholics and white southerners. He won 55 percent of the Catholic vote and 72 percent of the votes cast by white southerners, taking that region with 63 percent—his largest percentage in any region. He also benefited significantly from an eight-year drift of

so-called middle Americans—people of moderate income, blue-collar workers, and high-school graduates—toward the Republican camp, where they joined its traditional coalition of white Protestants, high-income people, and individuals with high-status employment. Yet, as the polls indicated, Reagan had won the election on the basis of personality, not political philosophy. It was also apparent that the nation was entering an era of declining party loyalty. Two out of five voters in 1984 were members of the "baby boom" generation or younger. They were far more likely than their parents to call themselves independents, and they represented a considerable challenge, and promise, to both parties.

Congressional Elections

The results of House and Senate elections were disappointing to both parties. Republicans, who discovered that Reagan had short coat-tails, lost two seats but maintained control in the Senate, which the Democrats had hoped to take away from them. At the same time the Republicans failed to regain control of the House but chipped away part of the Democratic majority there for a net gain of fourteen seats. Of the fourteen Democratic senators up for reelection, thirteen were reelected, and three Democratic House members won Senate seats formerly held by powerful Republicans: In Illinois Rep. Paul Simon edged out Sen. Charles H. Percy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in Iowa Rep. Tom Harkin defeated Sen. Roger W. Jepsen; and in Tennessee Rep. Albert Gore Jr. won the seat vacated by Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. Yet the Democrats failed to upset Republicans in five other states where Republicans had seemed beatable, including North Carolina, where Sen. Jesse Helms narrowly won reelection in a bitter, expensive contest against Gov. James B. Hunt, and Texas, where Phil Gramm, who had resigned his House seat after losing his Democratic committee assignments for voting too often with the Republicans, ran for the Senate as a Republican and won. Other Senate newcomers included Democrat John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Democrat John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the only Republican to defeat a Democratic incumbent.

Sources:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 40 (1984);

Gerald M. Pomper, Ross K. Baker, Charles E. Jacobs, Scott Keeter, Wilson Carey McWilliams, and Henry A. Plotkin, The Election of 1984: Reports and Interpretations (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1984);

Austin Ranney, ed., The American Elections of 1984 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985).

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1966 ELECTIONS

The Republican Comeback

After its devastating losses in 1964, the Republicans came back strong in

1966, erasing House and Senate deficits incurred two years earlier. Although Democrats held on to their majorities in both houses of Congress, President Johnson lost the liberal mandate that had allowed him to push through his Great Society legislation in 1965. Part of their success was attributed to former vice-president Richard M. Nixon, who campaigned actively for Republican candidates nationwide and emerged as his party's chief spokesman, filling the leadership role left vacant after Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964.

Republican Gains in the Senate

Moderates Charles H. Percy of Illinois, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, and Howard Baker, Jr., of Tennessee took Senate seats formerly held by Democrats. Liberal Republican Edward R. Brooke of Massachusetts became the first black elected to the Senate in the twentieth century. Incumbents in both parties did well. Only one, Democrat Paul H. Douglas of Illinois, was defeated. The fifteen Democrats who won reelection included several powerful southerners. Republican southerners John G. Tower of Texas and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who had switched parties in 1964, were also reelected. The election of Democrat Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings of South Carolina to fill out the term of the late Olin D. Johnston was attributed in part to the growing strength of black voters in the South.

Republicans' Strong Showing in House Races

GOP candidates took fifty-two House seats from Democrats and lost only five for a net gain of forty-seven that more than erased their net loss of thirty-eight two years earlier. Democratic liberals were hit especially hard. Twenty of the forty-seven Democrats who took House seats from Republicans in 1964 were

defeated. Four more of these Democrats, who retired, were replaced by Republicans.

Governorships Split Fifty-Fifiy

Republicans made their biggest gains in gubernatorial races, picking up eight new governorships for a total of twenty-five. With the election of Ronald Reagan in California and Raymond P. Shafer in Pennsylvania and the reelection of George W. Romney of Michigan, James A. Rhodes of Ohio, and Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, Republicans had the governorships of five of the seven most populous states. Reagan's victory over incumbent Edmund G. (Pat) Brown with a plurality of nearly one million votes enhanced the conservative Republican's standing as a possible presidential candidate. Romney's 60.1 percent victory in Michigan increased speculation about his chances for the nomination, while Rockefeller's election to a third term by a majority far greater than polls had predicted kept alive his presidential hopes. His brother Winthrop Rockefeller defeated a militant segregationist to become the first Republican governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction. Another presidential hopeful, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, could not, by state law, succeed himself, so his wife, Lurleen Wallace, ran in his place. She easily defeated her Republican opponent.

Sources:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 22 (1966);

Time, 88 (18 November 1966): 3-33.

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1986 ELECTIONS

Democrats Regain the Senate

Two years after handing the Democrats a stunning defeat in the 1984 presidential election, American voters on 4 November 1986 gave that party a majority in the Senate, which had been controlled by the Republicans since their sweep of the senatorial elections in 1980. In fact six of the Senate newcomers of 1980 were among the nine GOP senators defeated in 1986 by Democrats, who lost only one of their own incumbents, for a net gain of eight seats. Of the thirty-four seats at stake in 1986, Democrats won twenty. Eleven of the thirteen new faces in the Senate were Democrats. These results were achieved despite a Republican campaign chest eight times the size of the Democrats'.

Democratic Wins in the South

After Reagan's 63 percent victory in the South in 1984, the region had appeared to be a Republican stronghold for the foreseeable future. But southern voters shocked the pundits by electing Democrats to all five of the southern seats up for election in 1986. Democratic wins in the South illustrated a pattern that party candidates used successfully nationwide. While the GOP spent much of its money on television advertising and a national campaign to mobilize Republican voters, Democrats stressed local issues, accusing their opponents of being "national Republicans" with little concern for what was happening back home. The Democrats also relied on old-fashioned grassroots organizing, and—especially in the South—they rebuilt traditional Democratic alliances and renewed ties with local party officials. Moderate Terry Sanford won in North Carolina by securing the backing of conservative Democrats. They helped him attract voters who might otherwise have voted for Republican incumbent James T. Broyhill (as they had for Republican Jesse Helms in 1984). In Alabama Rep. Richard C. Shelby, a conservative Democrat, beat GOP incumbent Jeremiah Denton by developing links to the Democrats' black and labor-union supporters. Democrat Wyche Fowler Jr., an

Atlanta congressman, also enlisted the support of local party officials, who helped him overcome rural Georgians' doubts about his urban roots and defeat Republican incumbent Mack Mattingly.

House Seats

Democrats increased their majority in the House of Representatives by five, but Republican losses were below average for a president's party in an off-year election. In general voters seemed to be saying that they liked the status quo in the House. Only five Republican incumbents and one Democratic incumbent were defeated. One noteworthy newcomer was Democrat Mike Espy, the first black Mississippian in the House since 1883.

Governorships

Any attempt to interpret the Democrats' victories in the national elections of 1986 as a swing in voter sentiment toward the Democratic Party was cut short by the results in the governors' races. The GOP ended up with a net gain of eight, for twenty-four governorships—their highest count since 1970.

Source:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 42 (1986).

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1962 ELECTIONS

Democrats Hold Their Own

In off-year elections the party of the incumbent president customarily loses seats in Congress. In 1962 Republicans went after Kennedy's record—charging that he had fumbled on foreign policy and failed to win support for his domestic programs. This strategy was neutralized, however, by Kennedy's successful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis just before the election. For the first time since the 1934 off-year election, the president's party gained seats in the Senate, giving the Democrats a 68-32 majority. (They lost one seat when Democratic senator Dennis Chavez of New Mexico died less than two weeks after the election and Republican Edwin L. Mechem was appointed to serve the last two years of Chavez's term.) Reapportionment had made the House of Representatives two seats smaller than it had been in 1960, and the Democrats lost four seats, well below the average of thirty-eight losses for the president's party in off-year elections since 1900. The Republicans gained only two seats.

Senate Newcomers

Among the ten new senators elected in 1962 were Democrats George McGovern of South Dakota, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and Gaylord A. Nelson of Wisconsin. Earlier in 1962 Edward M. Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, had been elected to complete the Senate term vacated by his elder brother, John F. Kennedy, which expired in 1964.

Republican Gains in the South

All Republican incumbents in the House were reelected, and the party won five new seats, adding to their southern strength in the House. The strong showing of the Republican Senate candidate against a four-term incumbent in Alabama also suggested growing Republican support in the South. The

"Solid South" that had voted Democratic since the end of the Civil War no longer existed.

Nixon's Valedictory

The biggest news of the 1962 elections was Richard M. Nixon's press conference after losing the California governorship to Democratic incumbent Edmund G. (Pat) Brown. In words that the staunchly Republican Time magazine called "too small in spirit to make for real tragedy," Nixon told the press, "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more." Time concluded that, "barring a miracle," Nixon's political career was over.

Presidential Hopefuls Win Governorships

Although each party ended up with the same number of governorships as it had after the 1960 elections, the impressive victories of moderate Republicans William Scranton in Pennsylvania and George Romney in Michigan inspired talk about them as potential presidential candidates. The front-runner for the Republican nomination was believed to be Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, who easily won his second term. Democrats George C. Wallace of Alabama and John D. Connally of Texas won the governorships of their states.

Sources:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 18 (1962);

Time, 20 (16 November 1962): 3-28.

NATIONAL POLITICS: 1982 ELECTIONS

The Ninety-seventh Congress

The Republicans' margin in the Senate was unchanged after the 1982 congressional elections, with the GOP holding onto its majority, owing in large part to a nationally financed campaign that tipped the balance in favor of the Republicans in every close contest. Only five new senators were sworn in at the opening of the Ninety-eighth Congress. Big changes took place in the House of Representatives, where redistricting and fallout from the recession of the early 1980s resulted in the election of 81 new congressmen, 57 of them Democrats, increasing their edge in the House to 103 seats. The majority of the new Democrats campaigned on promises to defend the social programs the Reagan administration was trying to cut back, while promising to hold down the creation of new ones. Most of them also called themselves fiscal conservatives and blamed the recession on Reagan's supply-side economic measures. Several Republican incumbents from districts hurt badly by the economic downturn lost their seats because they allowed themselves to become too closely associated with Reagan's economic programs. When reapportionment had shifted 17 House seats to the Sun Belt, many had predicted that the House would become more conservative. The Republicans had hoped to take a dozen of these new districts in the South and Southwest, but Democrats, most of them moderates, won in 10. The Democrats also managed to withstand the losses of districts in the Northeast and Midwest. In the ten northern states that lost seats in the reapportionment, Republicans ended up with 18 fewer seats than they had after the 1980 elections. Their losses were a setback for the Republicans but not a major upset. Hereafter the Reagan administration would have to compromise with liberal and moderate Democrats rather than counting on a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats to push through its programs relatively intact.

Governorships

The Democrats also gained seven governorships, while suffering the defeat of only one Democratic incumbent. Among the Democratic victors were Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who won back the governorship he lost in 1980; Bruce Babbitt, reelected as governor of Arizona; Richard Riley, elected to a second term in South Carolina; George C. Wallace of Alabama, a onetime segregationist who won a fourth term by putting together a coalition of blacks and working-class whites; and newcomers Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, Robert Kerrey of Nebraska, and Mario Cuomo of New York.

Source:

Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 38 (1982).

^* By the 1984 elections there were 45 Democrats and 55 Republicans in the Senate.

^* By the 1984 elections there were 267 Democrats and 168 Republicans in the House.