Midwestward Ho!

In clouds and swarms, the politicians, pundits and pollsters descended on the Midwest. Not since the great locust plagues of the 1870s had the farm states seen such an invasion: candidates criss crossed one another's paths, columnists probed and interviewed, and any farmer who had not been polled by the pollsters felt sadly neglected. The consensus at week's end: Adlai Stevenson has cut into Dwight Eisenhower's farm strength, but not by enough to win the national election.

Democrat Stevenson was leaving no field unplowed in his effort to win the Midwest. Following up his defense of continuing surpluses and his promises of fixed 90%-of-parity price supports made in his major farm speech at Newton. Iowa (TIME, Oct. 1). he rounded out his case (see box) at Oklahoma City, picturing the farmer's lot under the Republicans in terms of despair and suffering. Then he took off for a trip through the South, but by midweek he was back in Missouri, thence to Indiana.

Word from What Cheer. To Peoria, Ill. traveled Dwigtit Eisenhower, having already turned down all suggestions that he try to outpromise Stevenson. If Adlai's farm-rich home state was turning against Ike (who carried Illinois by 443,000 in 1952), it could not be seen in the crowds fanking Peoria's streets four and five deep. That night in Bradley University's overflowing field house (seating capacity: 8,300), Eisenhower was interrupted 31 times in 28 minutes by applause while he scorned the Democratic farm program, stood confidently by his own (see box).

Nonetheless, from every hamlet and crossroad, pundits pushed the panic button for Republicans after studying the skies (large parts of Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma and Iowa, as well as Kansas, are suffering from drought) and the statistics (Republicans cringed at an Agriculture Department report last week showing that farm prices had gone down by .5% between mid-August and mid-September). Wrote Columnist Stewart Alsop under a What Cheer, Iowa dateline: "Candidate Eisenhower is in deep, deep trouble in the typical Midwestern farm community which surrounds this small town."

Interest in Divorce. Some of the pollsters agreed. A squad of New York Times-men, circulating among the crowds at Newton's National Plowing Contest, came forth with the information that "10.6% of those who said they voted for General Eisenhower in 1952 now say they will shift in November.'' A farmers-only poll in Iowa released this week by Hallaces' Farmer and Iowa Homestead shows 43% for Stevenson, 35% for Eisenhower, 22% undecided (in July, the same poll showed Ike 49%. Adlai 32%, undecided 19%).

But Pollster Sam Lubell, while recognizing the genuine need for G.O.P. worry about the farm vote, also found cause for Republican cheer. Wrote he: "Strong as the uprising is against the Republicans in the rural Midwest, much of its force is being blunted by two feelings. One is a deep sense of gratitude to President Eisenhower for ending the Korean war. The other is a widespread dislike of Adlai Stevenson among farmers, and criticism for his divorce . . . In 1952 among several thousand voters I interviewed, only about a dozen brought up Stevenson's divorce as their reason for voting against him. In this campaign, however, in nearly every city and farm county I have gone into, one of more voters have volunteered that they would be for the Democrats except 'if a man can't run his family, he has no business trying to run the country.' "

The Long, Steep Climb. With such factors in mind--plus the fact that even in the Midwest the farm vote is less than 20% of the total--Adlai Stevenson's big farm push seemed to be winning back only Missouri (where his prospects look good) and Oklahoma (where he. appears to have a decided edge), along with a chance for Minnesota. Given those three and the South (although Florida and border-state Kentucky cannot be considered solid for the Democrats), Stevenson would still fall considerably short of the necessary 266 electoral votes.

That meant that Stevenson would have to make up the deficit in the Far West--where his best chance is to grab onto Senator Warren Magnuson's flying coattails in Washington--and the industrial Northeast, where Pennsylvania looked especially important to the political swarms that were heading its way. That the Stevenson campaign still faced a steep uphill climb was evidenced by last week's Gallup poll, showing Ike still ahead of Adlai by 52% to 41%, with 7% undecided. For all the talk of farm revolt and G.O.P. disaster, Adlai Stevenson had not yet gained a single percentage point on Dwight Eisenhower since the poll published two weeks earlier.

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