The States: Local Concerns

Jumping the gun by a year, Republican candidates from Kentucky to New Jersey proclaimed that the pivotal issue in last week's statewide elections would be President Johnson's waning popularity. As it turned out, the voters were concerned with local questions—notably taxes, education and racial controversies—more than Administration policies, domestic or foreign.

Kentucky: Nunn Better One of the few bright touches in Kentucky's humdrum gubernatorial race was provided by an irreverent underground slogan: "Half an Oaf Is Better than Nunn." Republican Candidate Louie B. Nunn, 43, a back-country lawyer who in years past managed the successful senatorial campaigns of John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton, countered with his own vaguely punny slogan: "Tired of War? Vote Nunn." Kentuckians chose Nunn. Defeating Democrat Henry Ward, 58, a former highway commissioner handpicked by retiring Governor Edward Breathitt, Nunn became the first Republican Governor elected in Kentucky since 1943.

The long-entrenched Democrats suffered from tired blood and intramural peevishness, and Candidate Ward campaigned on a broken record of me-tooism, echoing Nunn's opposition to a statewide open-housing law and new taxes. Neither contender openly courted Kentucky's segregationists, but both gleaned more votes from that quarter than Conservative Candidate Christian Glanz Jr., who was seeking 2% of the total vote in order to qualify his party for the 1968 presidential ballot and thereby qualify Alabama's George Wallace for a third-party spot. Nunn received 449,788 votes, Ward 423,189—and Glanz a scant 5,169, barely half of 1%. Thus Kentucky's vote in effect was for moderation.

Mississippi: Back to One Party In Mississippi, Republican Rubel Phillips, 42, an erstwhile segregationist who this year appealed for an end to racial rancor, lost to Democrat John Bell Williams, 48, by a vote of 293,188 to 126,753. Williams, a strident dissident who bolted the Democratic Party in 1964 to support Barry Goldwater and thereby lost his seniority in the House of Representatives, cashed in on Phillips' plea to voters to give up the fight against desegregation in order to elevate Mississippi economically. Phillips' radical suggestion tarred other Republicans: only one of 60 G.O.P. candidates was victorious, and the Republicans lost the two house and one state senate seats they had captured in 1963. Lamented one Mississippi Republican: "They just set us back another 15 years."