THE voting booths were trundled back to the warehouses, the campaign buttons tossed aside and television's paid political announcements silenced. Then came the statistics: the major networks with their computers projected winners across the country (and scored some bloopers --see THE PRESS). After that, the newspapers followed up with column after column listing the results. It was then that TIME'S editorial staff, which in many respects had been working on the election for months, began to get down to the most critical part of its job.

Our task was to fit the results into the intricate mosaic of U.S. political life, to consider the outcome of individual races and find whether they produced cohesive national patterns. The strong Republican gains across the country almost immediately indicated a cover story on the most interesting G.O.P. winners. Early Wednesday morning, the editors in New York chose the six cover subjects and asked for detailed reportage and analysis from correspondents in the field, particularly in Boston, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Chicago. In every case, the correspondents involved had been closely following the race in their area, and their job now was to draw on their firsthand knowledge in order to contribute to a reassessment of the man and the race in national terms.

New York Political Correspondent Nick Thimmesch had been following the Rockefeller road since the gubernatorial campaign of 1962. On election night, he was one of three newsmen admitted to the Rockefeller campaign inner sanctum--room 945 of the New York Hilton. Michigan Governor George Romney has been one of Detroit Bureau Chief Mark Sullivan's assignments for more than two years. San Francisco Bureau Chief Judson Gooding had been on the track of Oregon's Mark Hatfield ever since moving from our Paris office last January. Gooding had come away from his first interview with a deep impression of his new source: "Hatfield drew me out on De Gaulle, what his policies portend for the Western alliance, for U.S. trade and for the future of Franco-American relations. His questions showed a remarkable depth of understanding."

Chicago Bureau Chief Loye Miller had been following the Illinois campaign since the day Charles Percy announced his intention to run. In Boston, Correspondent Dave Greenway, collaborating with Bureau Chief Ruth Mehrtens, topped off the close coverage of the campaign by tucking napkin under chin and sharing Edward Brooke's night-be-fore-election "soul food" dinner of pigs' feet and Moet et Chandon champagne. Los Angeles Bureau Chief Marshall Berges, who lives a scant two miles from Ronald Reagan and had followed the candidate's progress for 18 months, did not remember any champagne. "It added up to uncounted cold cups of coffee at airports, box lunches on buses, and in wine country, great clumps of unwashed grapes," Berges recalled. "Once when the rest of the family was away, we had lunch together at his house. He served a tunafish salad that Nancy Reagan had prepared and left in the refrigerator. After lunch, Reagan washed the dishes himself, leaving the kitchen spotless--like a well-trained husband."

Armed with the personal impressions and regional political savvy of these and other correspondents across the country, Editor Michael Demarest, Writer Ronald Kriss and Researcher Nancy Atkinson drew their own sharp focus on the national picture and turned out the cover story of the Republican resurgence and its implications for the future of the U.S.

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