CAN McGOVERN BE REELECTED?
Stoner, Bruce M.
a Dove in the Dakotas can McGovern be Reelected? by BRUCE M. STONER South Dakota Republican leaders, driven by a fervent desire to reclaim the only major political office not now in their grasp,...
...Those New Yorkers who are holding cocktail parties [for] McGovern . . . are not going to permit the sharing of their money with a Republican candidate for the Senator's seat...
...Senator is confident that his record during two terms in the House of Representatives, two years as President John F. Kennedy's Food for Peace director, and a full term in the Senate has met the approval of the majority of his constituents...
...as an influential freshman Senator willing to be an independent to do battle for his principles...
...It is doubtful this new strategy will be any more effective than its predecessors...
...It was pointed out that the Senator had recently charged that the escalation of bombing in North Vietnam was wrong, and that he warned that stepping up the war had brought World War III closer...
...Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York ran strongest, fifty-six per cent, against Johnson's twenty-five per cent, with nineteen per cent undecided...
...It ii conducted by a staff at Augustana College in Sioux Falls...
...Only two names have been mentioned: Governor Nils Boe, a Sioux Falls bachelor attorney now completing his second (and last by law) two-year term, and his immediate predecessor, Archie Gubbrud, Alcester farmer who also served two terms...
...This is the reputation he has established in South Dakota...
...Farm 79% 75% ~6%~ Town 79 20 1 City 59 34 7 State 71 24 5 McGov...
...As the editor of a South Dakota daily paper, I received numerous "letters to the editor" on this issue...
...many asked...
...Gubbrud Undec...
...Results of that South Dakota Poll a year ago surprised just about everybody, McGovern included...
...Two months later, however, another door seemed to have opened to the Republicans...
...The poll is sponsored by three South Dakota daily newspapers—The Water-town Public Opinion, Aberdeen American-News, and Sioux Falls Argus Leader...
...What strategy South Dakota Republicans will develop in their determined effort to unseat McGovern is not yet apparent...
...He initiated an attack on McGovern's Congressional record on agriculture...
...J. William Fulbright, Arkansas...
...Isn't he flirting with political suicide...
...GOP Chairman Howard said the offer "is nothing but a smokescreen to hide McGovern's fund-raising activities...
...The odds now are that it will be Governor Boe...
...During the past five years, the opposition has twice attacked the Senator heavily on issues they thought would find him vulnerable...
...Only sixteen per cent said they approved of the Administration's handling of the Vietnam War...
...I expected criticism, and I do not complain about it...
...Shortly before the straw vote was published, the Senator wrote in his monthly newsletter: "Since my recent speech warning that World War III may be the result of our deepening involvement in Vietnam, I have noted several critical reactions...
...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John Kenneth Galbraith both made appeals at the party...
...GOP headquarters in Pierre had spotted a story in the July 5 Washington Post reporting that "Eastern liberals in New York and elsewhere have quietly begun to raise money in behalf of 'dove' Senators whose seats are in jeopardy in 1968...
...With this outcome, GOP spokesmen developed a reluctance to challenge McGovern on the Vietnam issue...
...instead, they called for solidarity in support of our Asian intervention, questioning only whether the President's handling of it was as strong as it should be...
...Richard Nixon and Governor George Romney of Michigan both polled fifty-one per cent to Johnson's thirty-four, with fifteen per cent undecided in each case...
...Nearly everybody but McGovern's staff was surprised last December when the South Dakota Poll showed McGovern ahead of Boe by sixty per cent to thirty-two per cent, with eight per cent undecided, and ahead of Gubbrud sixty-six to twenty-nine, with five per cent undecided...
...If the election had been held then, the Senator would have swamped either Gubbrud or Boe, according to these results in a strongly Republican state: McGov...
...This is as apt and concise an evaluation of McGovern as one can make...
...The Republicans are expected to refrain from any primary contest for Senate nomination for fear that such a race would have a divisive effect...
...McGovern was listed as one of the beneficiaries of this effort, along with Senators Frank Church, Idaho...
...By that time U.S...
...And this year virtually every major farm organization has supported his proposed legislation to provide a strategic grain reserve...
...It is his steadfast opposition to the Johnson Administration's policies that is working so strongly in his favor...
...Half wanted further escalation "in an attempt to force a decision," thirty-four per cent wanted to de-escalate "in an attempt to bring the matter to the conference table and reduce the American role in Vietnam...
...Reagan trailed Mr...
...Senator Charles Percy of Illinois led the President forty to thirty-six per cent, with twenty-four per cent undecided...
...Then the poll showed McGovern with fifty-four per cent, Boe thirty-nine per cent, and seven per cent undecided...
...As one wag put it: "About all they haven't committed by now is a candidate...
...In 1965 the Senate adopted the substance of McGovern's proposal to provide grants to help universities assist agricultural and economic development in other countries...
...But none of us has the right to question the patriotism of men who sincerely disagree with us...
...In the absence of any drastic changes by election time, this could well turn out to be the decisive plus for McGovern...
...One factor favorable to the Republicans in this year's campaign is that there is not likely to be any major Democratic threat for the two House seats or for any state constitutional office...
...As the polls have consistently demonstrated, the Senator's strongest support is in rural South Dakota, and there is little in the new attack to shake that support...
...George McGovern today appears to be in no grave danger of losing his bid for reelection...
...Both have indicated interest in Senate candidacy, but neither has announced...
...It will take a lot of doing in this normally Republican state, but the BRUCE M. STONER is managing editor of the Mitchell, South Dakota, Daily Republic...
...this leaves the GOP organization free to mount a concentrated assault on McGovern...
...It has missed on only two races in its fourteen years of operation...
...some observers place the potential loss to the Senator at 40,000 votes...
...If a person believes his country is following a dangerously mistaken course, as I believe we are in Vietnam, he would be unpatriotic not to speak out...
...And when they do, you'll see the most expensive political campaign this state's ever had...
...Johnson's war policies escalated, State Republican Chairman Charles Howard, National Committee-woman Louise Humphrey, and Party Executive Secretary John Graff poured out a flood of press releases denouncing the Senator's views—some of them hinting at disloyalty, even downright treason...
...In an editorial note in McGovern's new book in the American Heritage series, Agricultural Thought in the Twentieth Century, Alfred Young and Leonard W. Levy wrote that Senator McGovern has, in a decade of national political life, "established a unique reputation: as a spokesman for the once 'isolationist' Midwest who sees the interests of his farm constituents and nation served by a practical, humane internationalism...
...Here," they said, "is a dove going against his own party's Administration...
...Let's be realistic," he said...
...One of them was his role as one of the leading Senate critics of the war in Vietnam...
...Against Gubbrud, McGovern had fifty-seven per cent, Gubbrud thirty-five, and eight per cent were undecided...
...Ernest Gruening, Alaska, and Wayne L. Morse, Oregon, all Democrats...
...Neither attacked McGovern directly...
...But they miscalculated...
...Senator McGovern, the only Democrat South Dakota has sent to the U.S...
...McGovern reportedly was amassing a quarter-of-a-million-dollar "war chest" for the 1968 campaign...
...In 1964 President Johnson became the first Democrat in twenty years to win South Dakota's four electoral votes...
...Unless events beyond our imagining now disturb the course of the campaign, George McGovern will be reelected as a dove even as President Johnson loses South Dakota...
...Silence in such a situation would be political and moral cowardice...
...As in this year's poll on the Senatorial race, McGovern's strongest support on his Vietnam position came from farmers, with sixty-six per cent approving, thirty-four per cent disapproving...
...Stanley Frankel, a New York business executive and friend of McGovern's," the Post article said, "claims to have raised $13,000 for the South Dakota freshman with a series of phone and letter campaigns culminating in a June 7 cocktail party at the home of Carol Haussaman, a prominent New York real estate woman and philanthropist...
...A current companion poll on the Presidency showed that of the five most-mentioned GOP possibilities, the President could win over only Governor Ronald Reagan of California at this point...
...If I have a right to question the Johnson war policy, others have a right to defend it...
...Then, after a few months of comparative silence, GOP leader Howard tried a new approach...
...But McGovern can put the lie to this accusation...
...and as a scholar in politics...
...Today almost any Republican likely to be nominated by the opposition could put South Dakota back in the Republican column, according to surveys of public opinion...
...Senate since 1936 and one of the few in all the state's history, is fully aware the Republicans will be hunting for "dove," and he has long been planning and preparing to render their barrage harmless...
...involvement in Vietnam had expanded greatly and the list of dissenting Senators had grown within both parties...
...Republicans and Democrats alike wondered why a Democrat elected to the Senate in 1962 by the narrow margin of fewer than 600 votes in a normally Republican state would want to challenge the President of his own party...
...But public indignation against an Eastern invasion by cocktail-party types failed to materialize and GOP headquarters soon abandoned the issue...
...Joseph S. Clark, Pennsylvania...
...Worst of all, much of it was being raised by "Eastern liberals...
...First District Congressman Ben Reifel and the senior South Dakota Senator, Karl E. Mundt, were less vocal than their Republican colleagues...
...A private professional sampling taken for McGovern at about the same time showed almost identical results...
...The presence of so weak a Democratic candidate at the top of the ticket could hurt McGovern...
...As both the war and McGovern's criticism of Mr...
...Not only did the 1967 South Dakota Poll results show that a whopping seventy-three per cent of voters in both parties felt McGovern should publicly voice his opposition to U.S...
...Johnson forty to forty-three per cent, with seventeen per cent undecided...
...Farm 73% 25% 2% Town 82 17 1 City 60 33 7 State 70 27 3 These results reflect a remarkable advance for McGovern during the past year...
...With barely a year of Senate experience behind him, President Johnson wrote of him that it was "a tribute both to his knowledge of agriculture and to his legislative skill that he was chosen, while still a freshman Senator, to guide the 1964 farm bill safely through the Senate...
...But this factor may prove less an advantage to the Republicans than might ordinarily be the case because McGovern has been at odds with his President on two important issues —the war in Vietnam and the Administration's handling of agricultural problems—and the voters know this...
...Their original battle plan has failed to shake McGovern's strong position, if the polls are at all accurate...
...by BRUCE M. STONER South Dakota Republican leaders, driven by a fervent desire to reclaim the only major political office not now in their grasp, are mobilizing all their resources to defeat Senator George S. McGovern, the Democratic dove, this year...
...A year ago the same poll showed him to be ahead, but by a substantially smaller margin...
...The bill included McGovern's voluntary wheat certificate proposal, a domestic payments plan which in 1965 was extended to other commodities...
...policies in Vietnam, but nearly half of them agreed with the Senator's position on the substantive issue...
...McGovern's showing is in sharp contrast with President Johnson's...
...The Republican chairman charged that McGovern has failed to "get his good friend Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and his fellow Democrats in Congress to enact a workable farm bill...
...They were joined by Second District Congressman E. Y. Berry, the darling of the right-wing Americans for Constitutional Action...
...GOP leaders were not the only ones in South Dakota who felt McGovern had made a serious blunder in joining the vanguard of Vietnam critics...
...On the questionnaire sent to those polled, it was explained that Senator McGovern had been critical of the Johnson Administration's policies on Vietnam...
...Irx the light of recent polls, the two potential GOP candidates have little to look forward to...
...The actual "primary" is believed to be taking place right now, behind closed doors...
...Forty-seven per cent of those polled in that 1967 survey approved McGov-ern's position, fifty per cent said they disapproved, and three per cent had no opinion...
...All but one or two of them obviously originated in a GOP "letter mill" in Sioux Falls...
...Moreover, he said, "McGovern is always introducing bills and resolutions but these never seem to accomplish much...
...Another plus for the GOP is the unpopularity of Lyndon B. Johnson...
...It was not until the spring of 1967, more than three years after McGovern had launched his opposition on Vietnam, that a survey of his constituents' sentiment on the issue was made...
...Going against a war being waged to halt the spread of Communism—a war supported by people in his own state with a solid background of anti-Communist feeling...
...Gaylord A. Nelson, Wisconsin...
...All expressed indignation that the Senator was raising campaign funds at "cocktail parties...
...In 1966 the Senate approved his International Food and Nutrition Act...
...McGovern countered with an offer to pool his campaign funds with the campaign chest the Republicans were raising to oppose him, and to split it down the middle with his opponent...
...They charged that the Senator was raising a quarter of a million dollars to conduct his 1968 campaign, and had, in fact, already raised $100,000 of it...
...Boe Undec...
...Little change was noted between the December and February polls...
...He has always acknowledged that his victories in the past required the support of liberal Republicans and independents as well as Democrats to beat the GOP machine candidates, "as it will this time...
...Republican strategists Howard, Graff, and company seized on the story and issued press releases attacking McGovern for accepting Eastern liberal support "from money raised at cocktail parties...
...Of all the doves in the Senate, he may well be the strongest with the voters—and this is so despite the fact that he is a Democrat in a predominantly Republican state...
...Three months later, in late February this year, the outcome of the South Dakota Poll was even more discouraging for the Republicans...
Vol. 32 • April 1968 • No. 4
