Gain in Maine

"Payne 6f Maine," parodied Pine Tree State Democrats on the eve of last week's early-bird election, "is mainly on the wane." But not even Democrats, as the results rolled in, were prepared for the size of their gain. Not only did Frederick G. Payne lose, as expected, to lanky (6 ft. 4 in., 185 Ibs.) bow-tied Governor Edmund Sixtus Muskie, 44, the golden boy of Maine politics; Muskie, as the state's first popularly elected Democratic Senator, got double the plurality that he expected. And a train of Maine Democrats followed Muskie into power. Items: EUR| Second District Democrat Frank M.

Coffin, 39, handily won re-election to Congress as predicted. P: In the downstate First District, James C. ("Big Jim") Oliver, 63, a onetime G.O.P. isolationist, Coughlinite and Townsendite turned Democrat, defeated eight-term Republican Robert Hale by 3,000 votes to give Democrats two of Maine's three congressional seats. (Hale had squeaked by with only in votes in 1956.)

P: Ex-chiropractor Clinton A. ("Doc") Clauson, 63, Waterville fuel-oil dealer and onetime mayor, defeated onetime (1945-49) Republican Governor Horace Hildreth, 55, former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, by a respectable 10,600 votes.

P:Democrats gained twelve seats in the state legislature (still Republican controlled).

The man who beat Payne, handshaking, backslapping Ed Muskie, a Roman Catholic and father of three (a fourth is due in December), is the best campaigner on the Maine scene in many a year; even Republicans admit that he has been the most effective Governor in the last 50 years. He got the credit and Republicans the ill will last spring when he called a special legislative session, proposed to extend recession-ridden Maine's unemployment aid or accept federal help, was turned down by G.O.P. legislators. Just three days before election, President Eisenhower vetoed the Payne-sponsored bill to provide federal funds for depressed areas. Another economic factor: the 57,000-member A.F.L.-C.I.O. poured $40,000 into the campaign on behalf of Democratic candidates, takes credit for electing Oliver and Clauson.

Payne, for his part, was badly hurt in the eyes of Maine's rural Republicans because he never satisfactorily explained a $3,500 loan made to him six years ago by Bernard Goldfine (TIME, July 21), on which he had neither repaid principal nor been charged interest. Democrats cagily refused to exploit the Goldfine connection publicly, but talked it up privately, managed thereby to set up an issue that Fred Payne could never effectively rebut. Maine politicos estimate that the malodorous Goldfine affair prompted 20,000 Republican steadies to stay home from the polls, provided the margin that let the Democrats win the governorship.

Casting a haggard eye at the results, Maine's surviving G.O.P. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, whose vote margin dropped 12% in 1954, said: "We took a shellacking." Added Presidential Press Secretary Jim Hagerty: "The President views it as I do. We took a beating."

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