POLITICAL NOTES: Winning Ways

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Florida hogged the spotlight, but there were a few other lively performers onstage too:

¶ Texas elected its first Republican Congressman in 19 years and the fourth in its history. In a special election in the Panhandle, likable Ben Guill, 40, of Pampa, onetime lieutenant in the Navy, won over ten Democrats seeking the seat of Representative Eugene Worley, 41, also a Navy veteran, who resigned to take a judgeship. Guill got only 8,000 of the 35,000 votes cast, but the rest were shredded among his Democratic opponents. "I'm no intellectual giant and I don't have any ideas about going to the capital and changing up the Government," said ex-School-teacher Guill. "I don't know anything about Washington—just barely know what direction it is from here."

¶ Alabama rejoined the Democratic Party. The "Loyalists," those who back Harry Truman's national party, wrested control of the State Democratic Executive Committee from the Dixiecrats who took over in 1948 and deprived Truman of Alabama's eleven electoral votes. Lister Hill, a Loyalist, was nominated for another term in the U.S. Senate, by a 2-to-1 vote.

¶ In the Oregon registration, Democrats outnumbered Republicans, 354,572 to 346,036, for the first time since the state began listing voters in 1905. Everybody ascribed the change to the postwar influx of job seekers, who have made traditionally conservative Oregon the fastest growing state in the Union.

¶Ohio's "Mr. Republican," Robert A. Taft, running unopposed, got 73,000 more votes in the Republican primary than all seven candidates seeking the Democratic nomination put together. The winning Democrat, who will face Taft in November, is bouncy, bombastic State Auditor Joseph ("Jumping Joe") T. Ferguson. Since Jumping Joe, a jovial hack, was a bit weak on big world issues, Democrats had to reassure themselves that at least he was quite a vote getter. The story goes that when asked what he thought about Formosa, Jumping Joe replied: "Don't worry about Formosa—I carried it by 2,000 votes in 1948."