Elections: Assessing the Contests

IT is an off off-year, and the elections held around the U.S. last week reflected the fact: local issues ruled local contests. The great national topics--the China visit, the Viet Nam War, even the general state of the economy--did not seem to cut many votes. People were more preoccupied with matters closer to home: their safety, their pocketbooks, their neighborhoods. The candidates who won responded to these needs--but not according to any fixed ideology. If law-and-order worked in Cleveland and Philadelphia, it failed in Boston. Blacks did not always vote in a bloc and--like whites--split their ticket as they pleased. The newly enfranchised 18-to 21-year-old voters were conspicuous for working with --and not against--their elders. In Virginia, an independent won the race for lieutenant governor on a populist platform that cut across class and ethnic lines, offering a seeming palliative for almost every plain citizen's nagging anxieties.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans could take any particular pleasure from the election returns. In Kentucky, the only state where the two major parties were battling for the governorship, the Democratic candidate, Lieutenant Governor Wendell Ford, was the winner. The race was a partial test of President Nixon's economic policies since Ford campaigned against them. But the lone congressional contest also served as a token test. H. John Heinz III, heir to the ketchup and pickle fortune, gingerly defended Nixon's wage-price freeze in his campaign and won a 2-to-l victory. Democratic Mayor Joseph Alioto handily won re-election in San Francisco, despite the fact that he is under federal indictment for conspiracy and mail fraud and is on trial in the state of Washington for allegedly taking improper fees from public utilities. The Democrats reduced the Republican majority in the New Jersey state senate and won control of the assembly by a one-vote margin. In Indianapolis, popular Republican Mayor Richard Lugar was re-elected with substantial black support after his Democratic opponent waged a demagogic antibusing campaign.

What interested politicians and political scientists most in the 1971 returns was a fresh testing of a major issue of the 1968 national campaigns, law-and-order, and the performance of two segments of the electorate--blacks and the young. A survey:

LAW-AND-ORDER. As expected, Mr. Law-and-Order, Frank Rizzo. was elected mayor of Philadelphia. The onetime police commissioner, who had stridently campaigned against permissive liberals and black militants, drew most of his support from the city's ethnic population, especially Italian Americans. But he also got 25% of the black vote, even though black leaders had denounced him as a racist. It was a sign that some blacks are as worried about crime as whites. His Republican opponent, Thacher Longstreth, ran a smooth campaign, but he was unable to stop the tide of Republican crossovers who liked the image of the tough, honest, single-minded cop.

In Boston, however, the symbol of law-and-order took a drubbing. Pudgy Congresswoman Louise Day Hicks, who once galvanized the white militants of the city, proved to be no Bella Abzug of the right. She ran a confused, lackluster campaign, while the incumbent, liberal Democrat Kevin White, scarcely made a misstep. While campaigning in part on the number of men he had added to the police force. White stressed other accomplishments: building more schools, lighting more parks and preventing the expansion of the airport that would have added to the din in the city--particularly in the wards where Hicks is popular. White garnered an impressive 62.8% of the vote, defeating his opponent by a much greater margin than he did four years ago and burying her perhaps forever as a serious political force in Boston.

THE BLACKS. Before the election, black political leaders talked exuberantly of forging a solid voting bloc that might even dictate the choice of the Democratic presidential nominee at the national convention next year. The elections dimmed their dream. Even in Mississippi, where a popular, poised black candidate, Charles Evers, ran against a moderate white, William Waller, in the gubernatorial race, many blacks stayed home and approximately 10% to 12% of those who went to the polls voted for Waller (see story opposite). In Cleveland, Mayor Carl Stokes worked out an ambitious voting scheme for the city's blacks. He instructed them to vote for a moderate white candidate, James Carney, in the mayoral primary. They did overwhelmingly, and Carney won. Then in the general election he told them to switch their votes from Carney to the black candidate Arnold Pinkney. That was too tall an order and perhaps a mite arrogant. An estimated 18% of the black vote stayed with Carney, thus throwing the election to the law-and-order Republican, Ralph Perk, who is a prideful member of more than 100 ethnic organizations, ranging from the Polish Falcons to the West Side Irish-American Club. Perk, unlike Rizzo in Philadelphia, drew only 4% of the black vote on the law-and-order issue.

Some black candidates did prevail where they appealed to all races and not just to their own. Black moderates were elected mayor in two Michigan cities: Benton Harbor and Kalamazoo. When Richard Hatcher first ran for mayor of Gary, Ind., four years ago, the FBI flooded the tough steel town, federal marshals patrolled the polling places and the national guard stood on the alert near by. Hatcher was elected by a razor-thin majority after a vicious, vitriolic campaign. Last week he was re-elected by almost a 3-to-l majority and no guards were necessary. This time he won a few more votes in the white neighborhoods, where businessmen gave him credit for cutting down crime in the streets and for harassing the city's racketeers.

THE YOUNG. The youth vote surfaced significantly in areas where local issues aroused it; elsewhere it was submerged, an unpredictable factor going into 1972. In East Lansing, Mich., two city councilmen were elected by appealing to the newly enfranchised youngsters; both campaigned on issues popular at Michigan State University, such as building more housing and recreational facilities for the campus area (see story, page 18). In Newcomerstown, Ohio, 19-year-old Ronald J. Hooker won election as mayor on a law-and-order platform: he vowed to stop motorists from roaring through quiet village streets. The youth vote contributed to the election of Republican State Assemblyman Pete Wilson, 38, as mayor of San Diego. An advance man for Richard Nixon in the 1962 California gubernatorial campaign, Wilson won youthful support by putting a $300 ceiling on contributions from real estate developers and by turning down all billboard advertising in the campaign. In Jersey City, 55 years of corrupt machine rule came to an end when Paul Jordan, 30, was elected mayor with the solid backing of young voters, many of them teenagers. Jordan, who graduated from medical school only three years ago and specializes in control of drug abuse, decided to run when Mayor Thomas Whelan was ousted from office for accepting kickbacks from a construction firm.

Perhaps the most intriguing political approach was made in Virginia, where a veteran, tireless and salty campaigner, Henry Howell, won the race for lieutenant governor by running as an independent. Accusing his Democratic and Republican opponents of purveying "political Pablum," he championed the "little man" against the "big boys" in a campaign that was full of the flavor of bygone populism. He played down the race question, taking a less fervent stand against busing than his opponents. He concentrated on issues that would appeal to unaffluent blacks and whites alike: utility and insurance rates, hospitalization costs, the state tax on food and patent medicines. The voters responded. Along with the black vote, Howell drew a considerable portion of the white vote that went to George Wallace in 1968.

Though last week's parochial and in places eccentric elections might be considered irrelevant to the national campaign coming up next year, they may offer a clue to voting patterns. The American electorate seems to be in a mood of withdrawal from the awesome, painful issues that have burdened it for several decades. While dealing as always with national and international events, politicians may be forced to pay more heed than usual to the small matters that form so large a part of ordinary life.

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