PENNSYLVANIA: Voter's Farmer

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That anchor and pride of Republicanism, the great and prosperous state of Pennsylvania, went Democratic—solidly, surprisingly, and in a way that seemed to shatter the pathetic remnants of its once proud and efficient state G.O.P. organization.

In as governor was Democrat George M. Leader, 36, a young man whom few outside of his home York County had ever heard of until eight months ago. On top of that, the state house of representatives went Democratic 111 to 99, and the state senate returned a bare Republican majority (27-23). Never before—not even when fun-loving George H. Earle rode the tidal crest of the New Deal wave in 1934 —had Democrats come so close to making a clean sweep in Harrisburg.

In the congressional elections, the clean sweep stopped: the national pull of Dwight Eisenhower and the local hold of some G.O.P. county organizations was too great. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania will send three additional Democrats to Washington in January, and the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania delegation will be a slim 16 to 14.

The Reasons. What happened? There were several explanations, none of them adequate, all of them providing slivers of truth. Most pundits and politicos settled on unemployment as the major factor in the Democratic sweep. The U.S. Labor Department lists eight counties in Pennsylvania where unemployment is in the critical range of 10% or more of the working population. Some 377,000 Pennsylvanians are jobless; 120,000 have exhausted their unemployment compensation ($30 a week for 26 weeks); uncounted thousands more are what George Leader calls "underemployed," i.e., working less than 40 hours a week. A week before Election Day, a riot broke out in Donaldson's Crossroads, ten miles south of Pittsburgh, when 1,500 men turned out for 40 highway laborers' jobs.

But unemployment was not the only factor in Pennsylvania; it was not even the deciding factor. In other states (e.g., Ohio and Indiana), where unemployment is serious, the Republicans held up well. And in Pennsylvania the Democrats would have won by 60,000 votes even without the big cities and the depressed coal areas.

A second factor was the unpopularity of Republican Governor John Fine's administration and a Pandora's box of contributing local issues. Added to this, the Republicans ran a poor campaign with an unfortunate candidate. Lieutenant Governor Lloyd Wood, a cigar-chomping politician. Wood had to carry all of the liabilities and secured none of the assets of the Republican organization's 100-year-old reputation. The evil that political machines do lives long after their effectiveness is gone.

Another factor was the recent and rapid Democratic upsurge in eastern Pennsylvania. In 1951 the Democrats won the Philadelphia mayoralty, interrupting 67 years of Republican rule at City Hall. In 1952 Adlai Stevenson took the city by 162,000 votes—an election freak that bewildered the experts and bothered the Republican National Committee. It should have jogged the Republicans of Pennsylvania out of their complacency, but it didn't.

Finally—and most importantly—the