Rising Tide

On every side were signs of a rising Republican tide. New York Times surveyors, still making their way across the country, found Dwight Eisenhower leading in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Colorado, gaining in a "close" Texas race, apparently out of the running only in Oklahoma. The Gallup poll reported Ike ahead with a 60% lead in a region embracing twelve northeastern states with 153 electoral votes; in 1952 he won 55.2% of the popular vote in those states.

Gallup found Ike down seven percentage points, but still holding a comfortable 53% in the region encompassing Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. In the Illinois-Indiana-Michigan-Ohio region, Republican Eisenhower was reported up two percentage points to 58%. Local and state polls supported Gallup; e.g., second-week returns from the New York Daily News straw vote showed Ike with 60.8% in the state to Adlai's 39.2% (in overwhelmingly Democratic New York City, Eisenhower, incredibly, led by 51.2% to 48.8%). At Republican headquarters in Washington, National Chairman Leonard Hall, participating in an office pool, scribbled down his guess on Ike's electoral total: 375. And at Democratic headquarters a weary staffer said sadly: "There is a kind of lull in the campaign."

A few weeks ago the main hope of Democrats was that Democratic state and local candidates would pull Stevenson across the line by "reverse coattails." Now some of the state candidates are worrying lest Stevenson drag them backward into defeat. President Eisenhower has long been favored to win re-election-but not by the margins necessary to give coattail-hanging Republicans control of the House and the Senate. Last week the growing possibility of an Eisenhower landslide gave Republicans new hope for winning the desperate congressional struggle too.

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