The Figures

THE VOTE

Half the fun of elections is fiddling around with the figures afterward. Last week there were plenty of fascinating figures to fiddle with.

About 69,169,000 people voted for President. They represented 78% of the total registered vote, and 60% of the

U.S. population of voting age. The popular vote broke the 1960 record of 68,839,000, but it was not so impressive as it sounds, considering population growth (this was the presidential year that the World War II babies came of age) and the fact that the District of Columbia, voting for the first time, added 195,874 to the total (167,373 for Johnson, 28,501 for Goldwater).

Johnson won history's greatest popular vote-42,328,350 compared with Eisenhower's 35,590,000 in 1956. He also set a record for the biggest plurality, 15,688,172 as against Franklin Roosevelt's 11,078,000 in 1936. Johnson's 61.2% of the popular vote topped F.D.R.'s 60.8% in 1936 and Harding's 60.4% in 1920.

For the first time ever, Vermont went Democratic and Georgia went Republican. Alabama and Mississippi were carried by a Republican for the first time since 1872, South Carolina for the first time since 1876. Maine voted for a Democrat for President for the second time in its history; the other occasion was 1912, the year of the Bull Moose split in the G.O.P.

Students of ticket splitting will be engaged for months by the 1964 statistics. In Massachusetts, Johnson had a 1,100,000 plurality, Democrat Teddy Kennedy one of 1,000,000; but Republican Attorney General Edward Brooke, the nation's highest elected Negro state official, won by 750,000, and Republican John Volpe was still clinging to a narrow lead for Governor. In California, Johnson won by 1,200,000, but G.O.P. Senate Candidate George Murphy was elected by 200,000. In Michigan, Johnson had a 1,000,000 plurality, and Republican Governor George Romney won by 395,000. In Rhode Island, Johnson's plurality was 230,000, Democratic Senator John Pastore's was 308,419, but Republican Governor John Chafee won by a comfortable 85,604. In New York, Johnson buried Goldwater by 2,400.000 votes, while Bobby Kennedy defeated Republican Senator Kenneth Keating by what seemed, under the circumstances, a piddling 627,795.

And so the ticket splitting went-in Kansas, Vermont, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Washington, Delaware, Wisconsin, Montana, Pennsylvania. One of these days the statisticians will compute the percentage of voters who split their tickets, and the figure should be remarkable.

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