Election '82: Trimming the Sails

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Many Democrats seized on an ill-advised G.O.P. fund-raising letter sent out by Republican Congressional Leader Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan asking voters if they would like to see Social Security made "voluntary." But the issue failed to cut as strongly as the Democrats hoped; the elderly voted Democratic in no greater numbers than usual (about 57%). Democrat George Sheldon, for example, tried to make the sanctity of Social Security the central theme of his losing race for an open seat near Tampa. Said one voter: "Even the old folks like Reagan too much personally to buy all the wolf cries."

Despite the overriding concern over national economic issues this year, many major races turned, as is often the case, into contests of personalities. The biggest factor in Jerry Brown's defeat for the Senate was the flaky image that pestered him like a persistent Medfly. Connecticut voters passed judgment on maverick Republican Lowell Weicker's feisty attitude and sent him back to the Senate. Adlai Stevenson in Illinois, who held a significant lead in early polls, was hurt by the perception that he might be a wimp, a notion not dispelled when he publicly denied it.

Perhaps the most important political factor in the elections was incumbency, particularly in the Senate races. In 1980, 45% of all Senate incumbents won; this year the figure was 90%. "That seems to me a measure of the search for stability," says Democratic Pollster Peter Hart.

"I think the results should produce a soul searching by both parties," says Hart. "For Reagan and the Republicans, the message is that staying the course is not acceptable. The voters want to get people back to work. For the Democrats, the message is that this is not a broad mandate. People do not want to go back to the past. The voters want a mid-course correction and some constructive changes."

From a regional perspective, the races last week strengthen the national political pattern in which Democrats and liberals dominate in the North and East, Republicans are generally favored out West and the South juggles a conservative, generally Democratic mixture.

In the Northeast the most important Democratic victory was retaining, with unexpected difficulty, the governorship of New York. Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo, a soft-spoken but forthright liberal, put together the region's traditional Democratic base—union members, the poor, blacks, Jews and intellectuals—to beat back a strong challenge from a bright and brazen supply-side disciple, Lewis Lehrman, the millionaire owner of a chain of drugstores. The same coalition gave Lautenberg his New Jersey Senate seat.

In the Midwest, of ten governorships at stake, eight had been held by Republicans. Assuming that James Thompson holds on to his slim margin in the final Illinois tally, the G.O.P. will end up with only three. Democrats Celeste in Ohio, Anthony Earl in Wisconsin and Rudy Perpich in Minnesota won by margins of more than 15 percentage points, and James Blanchard in Michigan won by 7 points.