Ohio

Ohio's rotund Democratic Governor Mike Di Salle was hauled aboard the Kennedy bandwagon only at political gun point (TIME, Jan. 18), but once there, he appointed himself the architect of the Kennedy campaign in his state, freely predicted a massive Kennedy sweep. As it turned out, the only Ohio county to perform satisfactorily for Kennedy was industrial Cuyahoga (Cleveland), which is bossed by canny Ray Miller, one of the old-line Democratic county chairmen whose power Di Salle has long been trying to undercut. In the rest of the state, the Republicans, riding Nixon's 260,000-vote majority, regained control of both houses of the legislature and picked up two new congressional seats. Part of the reason, political pros agree, was the unexpected strength of the religious issue among Ohio's Protestants and the failure of Catholics to turn out for Kennedy as heavily as expected. But part of it was also the unpopularity of Mike Di Salle's state tax increases and the overconfidence that led the Democrats to coast during the campaign's final week while Republican State Chairman Ray Bliss bombarded voters with radio, TV and newspaper ads--and most important of all. brought in Ike. Last week, surveying the wreckage, Di Salle gloomily declared: "They're going to have to find a scapegoat, and it might as well be me." His foes among the Democratic county chairmen couldn't agree more.

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