MINNESOTA: Victory by Organization

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Hours before the newspapers were ready to concede anything, Minnesota's )ouncy senior Democratic Senator, Hubert Horatio Humphrey strode into the headquarters of the Democratic-Farmer- Labor Party in Minneapolis to congratulate Five-Term Congressman Eugene McCarthy for winning Minnesota's second senate seat. Humphrey knew his voters; as the hours rolled by, McCarthy rolled to a 70,000 margin victory over Stassenite Republican Ed Thye, and the D.F.L.'s popular Governor, Orville Freeman, roared to re-election by 161,000 votes for a third term. Long before dawn it was clear that for the first time since the Depression, Minnesota's three top offices were in the hands of Democrats: Humphrey, 47, Freeman, 40, and McCarthy, 42.

How They Planned. Of all last week's Democratic victories, the Minnesota win was the surest payoff of painstaking party organization, of long-range planning, of relentless year-round politicking and careful selection of candidates.

When Humphrey, a druggist's son who learned his economics and his liberalism in South Dakota's dust bowl, pulled debilitated Democrats and Farmer-Laborites into the D.F.L. in 1944, Stassenite Republicans held all of Minnesota's top offices. The D.F.L. took a stand on a coalition platform of "sincere liberalism" that ranged (and still ranges) from high, rigid price supports for farmers to high unemployment insurance for labor, etc. Humphrey tramped the University of Minnesota, Rochester's Mayo Clinic, even high schools, recruited promising young liberals, put them to work in the tightly disciplined D.F.L. organizations and marked the comers as future candidates. Humphrey was elected to the Senate in 1948; Sidekick Orville Freeman won the governorship in 1954.