The Crucial Lesson

When the U.S. woke up after the election with a ticket-splitting headache, many politicians and most pundits agreed with the hasty diagnosis of Fair-Dealing Columnist Thomas Stokes: "The personal victory of President Eisenhower dramatizes, by contrast, the increasing weakness of his party." This was a glib, convenient way of talking about Democratic congressional victories against the Eisenhower avalanche. But it was also a superficial and misleading explanation of an election that carried a deeper and vastly more significant meaning.

The true key to the 1956 election lay in the politically discriminating voter, better informed than ever before about personalities and issues. Long ago convinced that the presidential candidate of his choice would take care of such national issues as peace and prosperity, the voter exercised decisive power in choosing between state and local candidates without regard for party labels, political bosses or popular coattails. That voter changed all the equations of U.S. politics, for now and tomorrow.

Invaded South. The notion of the Republican Party (below Ike), as a wilting minority is statistically without base, even though both Ike and G.O.P. strategists were shocked that the avalanche did not sweep in a Republican House and Senate. East of the Mississippi no Democrat unseated a Republican House incumbent--and West of the Mississippi no Republican unseated a Democratic incumbent. Outside the South. Republicans carried at least 193 congressional districts; the Democrats carried fewer than 130. The Republicans cracked all traditionally Democratic ethnic and religious blocs except (amid the Israel crisis) the Jewish. In the South, every one of the five Southern Republican Congressmen held on to his seat. Ike rolled up a bigger popular vote in six Southern states than in 1952, and for the first time since the Civil War there was a genuine framework for a Southern two-party system.

But the memorable fact of 1956 was not that the Republican Party did badly or that the Democratic Party did well. It was that in state after state, district after district, town after town, voters ignored party affiliations to elect candidates of individual local merit (or to defeat candidates of individual demerit).

Thus, Pennsylvanians ousted Republican Senator James H. Duff, original Ike-man who had been a sulky, do-little Senator, in favor of personable Democrat Joseph Clark. But they gave Ike a smashing 592,000-vote plurality, and the G.O.P. regained full control of the state legislature. Similarly. Washington State re-elected popular Democrat Warren Magnuson to the Senate over Governor Arthur Langlie, on the basis of Maggie's generally hard work in the Senate and his shower of favors to his state from Washington, D.C.--but the state's hard-working Republican incumbents were returned to Congress from at least five of the state's six districts, and a controversial Democratic candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction was crushed by 150,-000 votes. And one Ohio county (Lucas), with rare selectivity, voted Republican for President. Congressman, state treasurer and secretary of state, while favoring Democrats for U.S. Senator, governor, lieutenant governor and state auditor.

Tattered Coattails. Political coattails were next to worthless. Adlai Stevenson had depended on strong Democratic state tickets to help him win; only in Missouri, where the Democratic ticket was led by able Senator Tom Hennings. did "Operation Reverse Coattails" succeed. Oregon's Republican Douglas McKay chatted endlessly at the corner gas station or general store about his service as Eisenhower's Secretary of the Interior. But Oregonians were interested in issues, e.g., public power, declining lumber prices, and they re-elected the man who discussed those issues: professorial Democratic Senator Wrayne Morse (who was also pretty good at the country-crossroads campaign once he got the hang of it). In Colorado. Republican Dan Thornton did little besides sashay around in cowboy boots and talk about his (very valid) friendship with Ike. But voters remembered that Texasborn Dan Thornton spends much of his time away from Colorado and that, as governor, he had tried to revise the bookkeeping on Colorado's old-age-pension system. They sent Democrat John Carroll, plain-spoken and obviously homegrown, to the Senate.

Ohio's Republican Senator George Bender campaigned as a 100% Ikeman--but Ohioans still thought of him as a bell-ringing buffoon at the 1952 Republican convention, and they overwhelmingly backed Governor Frank Lausche, a great vote-getter who managed to project his own honesty and humility (but little more), and thus seemed to rise above political partisanship.

Massachusetts' Republican Gubernatorial Candidate Sumner Whittier gladhand-ed his way around the state as a simon-pure Eisenhower supporter; he took a fearsome trouncing (141,000) from Democrat Foster Furcolo, who could point to a solid congressional record.

Clobbered Clowns. As they made their decisions, even voters in the most hidebound areas jumped traditional party lines in pursuit of their local or regional interests. Kansas Republicans, fed up with G.O.P. factionalism, named Democrat George Docking governor over Warren Shaw (who suffered the additional liability of charges that he had taken kickbacks on gasoline sales to the state). In Republican Iowa, voters resented G.O.P. Governor Leo Hoegh's move-fast, high-tax program (TIME, Oct. 22), and elected Democrat Herschel Loveless. In West Virginia, corruption charges against the outgoing Democratic state administration resulted in the election of Republican Old Guardsman Chapman Revercomb to the U.S. Senate and of Republican Cecil Underwood, a party comer at 34, as governor (Democratic House Incumbent M. G. Burnside lost to Republican Will Neal partly because the Democratic administration messed up a garbage-hauling contract). In the Great Plains, farm unrest caused the defeat of Republican House incumbents in South Dakota and Montana.

Contrasting political personalities played a vital part in the election outcome--and had little to do with political affiliations or governmental philosophy. Idaho's Republican Senator Herman Welker lost to eager-to-please young Frank Church not so much because Welker was a diehard reactionary as because of his arrogant, voter-be-damned personality and campaign. The longtime clowning of Missouri's veteran (25 years) Republican Representative Dewey Short palled, at long last, on his constituents. They chose a lesser offender: a professional showman, Democrat Charles Brown, onetime producer of the radio program Grand Ole Opry. Even in machine-bossed Jersey City, voters clobbered an egregious clown, Democrat T. James Tumulty, a 330-lb. jolly boy with a penchant for posing for photographers in his underdrawers, and voted in Vincent J. Dellay.

Battered Bosses. All sorts of would-be political bosses suffered painful bruises at the hands of the freewheeling electorate. Chicago's once-mighty Democratic machine could not even put across its Cook County ticket. In industrial New Jersey, C.I.O. leaders backed nine Democratic congressional candidates; only three of them won. In one Democratic urban stronghold after another there seemed to be no sign of a dependable "delivered" vote this year.

The independence of the 1956 voter holds far-reaching political implications. No longer can state and local candidates count on election simply because their party has done a good job at the national level. In that sense, the idea of national party responsibility may have been weakened. At the same time, the idea of personal responsibility--on both the national and regional scenes--has been strengthened. With their parties unable to help them survive slipshod performance, state and local office holders must meet their individual tests at the hands of an electorate fully capable of judging them accurately. This is the crucial lesson of 1956 --and the one that will probably shape U.S. politics in the years to come.

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