Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Two Parties Now Evenly Matched THE RECENT mid-term election showed that highly unpredictable political animal, the American voter, behaving pretty...
...But it has not struck at the roots of the social-security legislation enacted under the New Deal...
...This election confirmed the situation which was apparent in 1952, but which was obscured then by Eisenhower's striking personal victory...
...Nor did the "giveaway" denunciation seem to carry much weight, except perhaps in Oregon, where it may have helped Richard Neuberger defeat conservative Republican Guy Cordon in one of the closest of the Senate races...
...Now the strength of the two parries seems pretty nearly even...
...Second, social legislation is apt to be more expensive than its advocates anticipate...
...After the Civil War, the Republicans won most of the elections until the rising tide of progressive unrest split the Republican party in 1912 and gave Wilson an easy victory...
...The Republicans probably also suffered from the bitter controversy over McCarthy...
...The two parties are just about evenly matched, as the British Labor and Conservative parties have proved to be in the last two elections...
...Republican victory in the mid-term election of 1946...
...This is an interesting subject for study by political scientists...
...Beginning with 1920, there was another era of Republican ascendancy, which ended with the crash of the Great Depression...
...There was no repetition of a victorious Truman making monkeys out of commentators who had already picked Dewey's Cabinet, or of the same commentators falling flat on their faces predicting a thrilling photo-finish of a Presidential race that proved to be Eisenhower's in a walk...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Two Parties Now Evenly Matched THE RECENT mid-term election showed that highly unpredictable political animal, the American voter, behaving pretty much as the prophets expected...
...The closeness of the races in many of the more populous states??in New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey??recalls the last really close American Presidential election, in 1916, when Woodrow Wilson defeated Charles Evans Hughes after days of counting the vote in California...
...It is probably a mistake to read too many ideological trends into the returns in this uncommonly nip-and-tuck election...
...In America, where a very high proportion of the population enjoys middle-class standards of income and living (by comparison with Europe), there is corresponding resentment of a high level of Federal and state taxation...
...Then followed two decades of Democratic predominance, broken only by the negative "Had Enough...
...It was an unmistakable factor in Michigan, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Kentucky...
...The principal Republican talking points in the election were peace and tax reduction, with incidental cracks at alleged corruption and tolerance for Communist sympathizers in Government service under the Truman Administration...
...It has pruned a little here and whittled a little there...
...First, the Republican party has followed the tactics of the British Conservative party...
...The Democrats launched a three-pronged offensive: unemployment and underemployment, falling farm incomes, the "giveaway" of natural resources...
...All sorts of cross-currents affected the voting...
...The area of controversy between the two parties has been narrowed...
...I would suggest three tentative explanations...
...Spotty unemployment and underemployment hurt the Republicans more than the other Democratic talking points...
...In such debates, the party out of power always possesses a distinct psychological advantage...
...The normal human being is inclined to take benefits for granted and to react to grievances, and grievances are apt to inspire a vote against the party in power...
...In the state of which I am a resident, Massachusetts, a distinct coolness, not to say feud, between the Irish and Italian blocs in the Democratic party helped a Republican Senator and Governor win re-election...
...With the Democratic victory limited in proportions, with most of the chairmanships going to Southern conservatives, the outlook is for fairly harmonious coalition government??at least until the 1956 campaign approaches...
...Why is it that the New Deal magic, with its appeal to so many large voting blocs, is no longer rolling up the big majorities which Franklin D. Roosevelt gained...
...This confirms the belief that mass unemployment of the 1929-1933 proportions would be a political death sentence to the party that could be plausibly saddled with responsibility...
...Third, during the last fifteen years of general prosperity a good many Americans have risen in the economic scale, moved out to suburban homes, and acquired, among other suburban habits, that of voting Republican...
...A shift of the House to Democratic control and a virtual dead heat in the Senate just about conformed to the laws of political probability...
...On the other hand, there was no expression at the polls of fanner discontent comparable to that in the 1948 election...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 46
