New Tenants in the Statehouses
New Tenants in the Statehouses
Though the power and prestige of Governors are on the wane, the major parties still regard control of statehouses as an important measure of local strength. By that measure, the results were pretty much a standoff; despite some trading of ground in the 18 state contests, there was little change in the balance of gubernatorial power. Going into the election, the Democrats led the Republicans by 30 states to 20, and afterward the ratio remained substantially unchanged. The G.O.P. continued to trail in the overall total, but it still claimed most of the big states, despite an important setback in Illinois.
As usual, local personalities and local issues--particularly taxes--were pivotal. But the presidential tide had some effect, helping to seat Republicans in North Carolina and Missouri. In West Virginia, Nixon's strength helped to defeat one of the nation's most promising young Democrats. Despite an investment of considerable energy, a famous name and an expenditure of $1.5 million to unseat the savvy G.O.P. Incumbent Arch A. Moore Jr., 49, lanky John D. ("Jay") Rockefeller IV, 35, was unable to overcome the Republican surge and a carpetbagger image.
The Nixon sweep helped to produce a startling political horse race in Texas, where moneyed, conservative Democrats had always coasted to the statehouse on comfortable majorities. Much to his and almost everyone else's surprise, Millionaire Rancher-Banker Dolph Briscoe, 49, found himself in a down-to-the-wire battle with the Republican candidate, Houston History Teacher Henry C. Grover, 45. Grover came out of nowhere for several reasons --the Nixon landslide, Briscoe's own indifferent campaign, the presence of a Mexican-American candidate who drew many Chicano votes that normally would have gone to the Democrats. Backed by a cabal of ultra-right Houston businessmen, Grover did not mount an attractive campaign: he railed against revenue sharing and state taxes on personal and corporate income, and told a Houston TV interviewer that "I just don't care about the black and Chicano vote." Briscoe finally emerged as the narrow winner in the late counting.
Among the crop of new gubernatorial faces:
NEW HAMPSHIRE. Republican Meldrim Thomson Jr., 60, a publisher of law books, defeated Democrat Roger J. Crowley Jr., 60, a retired Navy captain. The two had a lot in common. They were both foursquare against state income and sales taxes, and they were both touted as "excellent candidates" by New Hampshire's reigning superconservative, William Loeb, publisher of the Manchester Union Leader. Loeb backed them both in their respective primaries, but threw his newspaper's support to Thomson in the main event. Possibly he simply soured on Crowley, who had lost a bid for the governorship in 1970 despite Loeb's backing, or perhaps he was disturbed that Crowley was seeking moderate support this time around.
VERMONT. Thomas P. Salmon, 40, started out with what looked like three strikes against him when he launched his campaign against Luther F. Hackett, 39, a tightfisted conservative protege of retiring Governor Deane C. Davis. Salmon is a Democrat, a Catholic and an admitted McGovern man. But he is also a widely respected attorney, an attractive shirtsleeves campaigner with an enthusiastic following, and a protege of former (1963-69) Governor Philip Hoff, the only other Democrat to reach the Vermont statehouse in this century. Salmon's upstream campaign began to turn into an upset when his charge that the Green Mountain State G.O.P. was soft on the ecology issue started to hit home. His case--and his victory --was finally made when the head of a pro-Hackett industry lobby called Common Sense Associates angrily responded to Salmon's charges by jeering: "What are we trying to save the environment for--the animals?"
DELAWARE. Democrat Sherman W. Tribbiff, 49, coasted into office on a kind of reverse landslide: the land simply slid out from under his opponent, Republican Incumbent Russell W. Peterson, 56. A research chemist with a Ph.D. who left a $75,000-a-year job at Du Pont to run successfully for the governorship in 1968, Peterson had won a deserved reputation as a reformer and innovator; among his credits was a widely praised coastal zoning law, enacted in 1971, that barred polluting industries from building plants along Delaware's 381-mile shore line. But Peterson's fortunes suddenly soured last summer when he was forced to admit that his revenue calculations had been "dead wrong." He then asked for a tax increase, the second in two years, to cover a huge deficit.
A hardware dealer from downstate Wallace country who serves as legislative leader, Tribbitt wisely responded to his opportunity by saying very little. The fact that Delaware has no commercial TV stations of its own was no handicap for the old-line Democrat. He is, as his son-in-law and campaign manager Skip Webb conceded to reporters, "not too articulate." Tribbitt simply waited patiently for his majority to pile up.
NORTH CAROLINA. Republican James E. Holshouser would be the last to deny that he owes his upset victory in this textile and tobacco state to the vote-pull-ing strength of Richard Nixon. A youngish (38), G.O.P. moderate who has been notably liberal on racial matters, Holshouser also had some campaign assets of his own, among them a record as a can-do state legislator and an endorsement from the Charlotte Ob- server. But he was outspent 2-to-1 by Democrat Hargrove ("Skipper") Bowles Jr., 52, an ebullient millionaire businessman who lavished $1.3 million on a slick statewide media campaign. Not even Bowies' G.O.P.-scale spending, or the Democrats' 3-to-l edge in voter registrations, could stem the Nixon tide, which made Holshouser North Carolina's first Republican Governor-elect since 1896.
ILLINOIS. In defeating Republican Incumbent Richard B. Ogilvie, maverick Democrat Daniel Walker came to a high point in a long and curious political journey. He won national attention four years ago as the author of the report that blamed "police riots" for a share of the disorders surrounding the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Then the tall, tanned lawyer, now 50, quit his $100,000-a-year job at Montgomery Ward vowing to overturn both the G.O.P. organization downstate and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's Democratic machine in Cook County. After he had hiked in denims 1,197 miles across Illinois, talking up his giant-killer theme, Walker edged out Daley's candidate in the primaries. But once he began campaigning against Ogilvie, an able Governor whose main political misfortune was authorship of the state's first income tax, Walker dropped the boss issue in favor of a vague promise that he would give the voters a "fighting chance." Had Walker made up with Daley? No one has said, but it is plain that Walker could not have won without some Daley cooperation in Cook County, which encompasses about 50% of the Illinois vote.
INDIANA. A chunky man who fairly exudes decency and reliability, Dr. Otis
R. Bowen, 54, looks like a movie version of a small-town general practition-er--which he is. But besides being a physician from Bremen, Ind., 20 miles from South Bend, Bowen is an astute politician who has been speaker of Indiana's G.O.P.-dominated house of representatives since 1967. Bowen and his courtly Democratic opponent, former (1961 -65) Governor Matthew E. Welsh, 60, both had the same prescription for Indiana: a reduction in property taxes, to be made possible by hikes in state sales and income taxes and increased state aid to local schools. The campaign thus focused on who had allowed Indiana's tax levies to soar in the first place. Bowen pointed to Welsh's first statehouse term; Welsh blamed general G.O.P. ineptitude. But with a strong assist from the Nixon wave, the doctor got the better of the argument.
MISSOURI. By capturing a statehouse that had been Democratic property for 28 years, Christopher ("Kit") Bond established himself as one of the more promising young Republicans on the national scene. Tall, handsome and 33 --he will be the U.S.'s youngest Governor--Lawyer Bond has assets that go well beyond a wealthy family and a Deerfield-Princeton-University of Virginia pedigree. He won with energy and charm, crisscrossing the state in a chartered Piper Seneca to speak in a faint Missouri twang to factory hands, bar groups and housewives on an issue that he has been able to mine deeply after two years as state auditor: mismanagement and corruption.
Normally cynical Missourians even seemed to believe that he might be able to do something about "dismantling the machine" and making public office a "public trust rather than a public trough." On the defensive from the start, Democrat Edward L. Dowd, a former FBI man who once headed the St. Louis police board, relied on a blitz of spot commercials stressing law-and-order themes and ignored Bond's challenges for a face-to-face debate until the closing days of the campaign. Bond made it a point to dodge Vice President Spiro Agnew when he passed through the state. With new political opportunities opening up, among them a possible try for Democrat Stuart Symington's Senate seat in 1976, he is careful to deny having a philosophical commitment to any wing of the G.O.P.
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