Republicans: The News from New Hampshire

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Rarely have so much energy and money been spent on so few. For weeks, Republican Presidential Candidates Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater crisscrossed snowy little New Hampshire, making speeches, shaking hands, telling terrible jokes, and viewing each other's views with vast alarm. Goldwater's people poured $150,000 into his campaign. Rocky's considerably more. Newsmen and pollsters swarmed in the candidates' wake. TV crew men tumbled and stumbled all over one another—NBC alone had some 600 workers on the job. In all, the media coverage of the New Hampshire primary ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And all for what? All to find out about the political likes and dislikes of some 93,000 New Hampshire Republicans who went to the polls.

The Hampshiremen knew what they liked, all right. They liked the idea of a revenue-raising sweepstakes lottery (already approved by the legislature), and they voted by a 3-to-l majority to permit lottery tickets to be sold at 49 state liquor stores and three race tracks. They also knew what they didn't like, and high on that list stood Rockefeller and Goldwater. In a remarkable protest vote, 35.4% of the state's Republicans wrote in the name of a man who had spent the entire campaign 10,000 miles away—Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., 61, the U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam.

The final standings in the nation's first presidential primary of. 1964 were: Lodge, 33,007 votes; Goldwater, 20,-692; Rockefeller, 19,504; Richard Nixon, also a write-in candidate, 15,587; Maine's Senator Margaret Chase Smith, 2,120; and hapless Harold Stassen, 1,373. Almost all of New Hampshire's top Republicans were running as delegates for either Rockefeller or Gold-water—among them Senator Norris Cotton, former Governor Hugh Gregg, former Congressman Perkins Bass, and Doloris Bridges, widow of the late Senator Styles Bridges. All were beaten. Instead, New Hampshire's delegation to the July Republican Convention in San

Francisco will consist of 14 relative un knowns—all committed to Lodge.

But Lodge's victory was even more impressive than such figures indicate. For one thing, while it is easy enough to write in a candidate's name on a paper ballot, which almost all of New Hampshire uses, it is fairly tricky to register a write-in on a voting machine. This requires turning a latch, which releases a lock, which frees a slide, which opens to permit space for the write-in. Yet in Portsmouth (pop. 27,500), the only

New Hampshire city with machines, enough voters went to all this trouble to give Lodge a lead over all rivals.