Splintering the Great Coalition

PRESIDENT Nixon's massive victory splintered a once dominant force in national politics: the Democratic coalition. Welded together by the despair of the Depression and the charisma of Franklin D. Roosevelt, it consisted of an unlikely amalgam of minorities: Southern whites, Jews, "ethnic"* blue-collar workers, blacks and campus-oriented intellectuals. Despite the disparate backgrounds and views of these blocs, the coalition was remarkably durable. It produced 20 consecutive years of Democratic Administrations, survived the virtually unbeatable heroic appeal and victories of Dwight Eisenhower, and regrouped to elect John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Severely split by the riotous Chicago convention in 1968, it began to reunite in the last weeks of that campaign and fell just short of putting Hubert Humphrey in the White House. But in 1972, while the coalition held much of its strength in electing Democrats to Congress and the statehouses, it came completely apart at the seams in the presidential election.

The fragmentation of the coalition was assured by the nomination of George McGovern. The resulting disaster was clearly foreseen by Kevin Phillips, author of The Emerging Republican Majority, who believes that the nomination "locked" the Democratic Party into the "new left side." In a remarkably prescient assessment, he wrote that "the Democratic Party is going to pay heavily for having become the party of affluent professionals, knowledgeable industry executives, social-cause activists and minorities of various sexual, racial, chronological and other hues." Indeed, the convention that nominated McGovern in Miami Beach may itself have impressed that change on the voters and put the election out of George McGovern's reach.

While speakers in Miami repeatedly stressed that the Democratic Convention, because of the "McGovern rules," was the first that was truly representative of Democratic voters, much of the public got another impression. The party seemed to be largely composed of antiwar radicals, militant women, blacks and eccentric youths. For the first time in 40 years, white Southerners, ethnics, many Jews and older voters could not identify with the Democratic Party leadership.

To assess the impact of McGovern's candidacy on traditionally Democratic voting blocs, TIME correspondents across the nation kept a close watch on carefully selected representative precincts on Election Night. The precinct voting percentages (compared with 1968 figures) and interviews with voters clearly point to the magnitude of the damage done to the Democratic coalition:

ETHNIC BLUE-COLLAR WORKERS: A startling switch to the G.O.P.

After giving Humphrey a substantial margin in 1968, many of the ethnics rejected McGovern this year. Angered by his support of legalized abortion, his attitude toward drugs, his proposed "surrender" to Communist North Viet Nam and amnesty for draft dodgers, these lower-and middle-class Catholic voters deserted the Democratic national ticket in record numbers, contributing significantly to Nixon's margins in the industrial Northern states. The ethnic exodus from the Democratic fold was further hastened by McGovern's stands on welfare, busing and other civil rights issues that directly affect the neighborhoods and jobs of white working-class voters. Nixon, on the other hand, aimed his campaign directly at the hyphenated Americans, appearing at several ethnic functions to stress his opposition to busing and the welfare "giveaway" and his dedication to the work ethic. The effort paid off. For the first time in its 28-year history, for example, the Polish American Congress's Ohio division endorsed a Republican presidential candidate. The results also showed at the polls. In Cleveland's 23rd Ward, which is 80% Slovene and blue-collar, Humphrey in 1968 captured 53% of the vote to Nixon's 24% (Wallace got 23%). This time, however, Nixon won a clear majority over McGovern, 57% to 41%.

THE BLACKS: Still solidly Democratic.

Across the nation, blacks were the only group in the old Democratic coalition that voted overwhelmingly for George McGovern. Blacks stood to gain the most from McGovern's programs. They were embittered at being virtually ignored by the Republican presidential campaign, at no time did Nixon campaign in a black neighbor-hood, and felt that Nixon's antibusing views were directed against them. Furthermore, the black division of the Committee to Re-Elect the President seemed to confine its efforts to winning the votes of higher-income black homeowners. Yet despite all that, blacks apparently found it more difficult to identify with McGovern than they had with Humphrey four years ago. In Memphis, for example, only 1.6% of the low-income blacks in Precinct One, Ward 14 voted for Nixon in 1968. This year the percentage increased to 9.9%. McGovern suffered a similar drop-off-in Roxbury, Boston's black ghetto. There Nixon received only 4.5% of the vote in the last election, but took 13.3% on Tuesday. A more substantial decline in Chicago's black Democratic vote helped defeat Cook County Prosecutor Edward Hanrahan (who organized the controversial raid on Black Panther headquarters in 1969). It also badly shook the entrenched Democratic machine of Mayor Richard Daley.

THE JEWS: Still Democratic, but slipping away.

Richard Nixon received only 15% of the Jewish vote in 1968, but this year captured nearly 40%, the largest percentage ever won by a Republican candidate. Part of Nixon's impressive gain was due to his Administration's strong support of Israel, but even more decisive was a widespread distrust of McGovern among Jews. In pressing for job quotas for minorities, McGovern alienated Jews who remember when quotas were used against them; the suggestion also seemed directly to threaten Jews currently employed as teachers and civil servants in numbers far exceeding their proportion of the population. Wealthier Jews were alarmed by McGovern's economic proposals, while middle-and lower-class Jews resented his busing stand and his apparent catering to the blacks who are moving into their neighborhoods. The results were apparent in Chicago's 42nd Precinct, 50th Ward, which has a heavy majority of upper-middle-class Jews. In 1968 the precinct gave Richard Nixon 20% of its vote. This year it was 35%. In Miami's Precinct 148, largely populated by older, retired Jews, Nixon boosted his percentage from 16% to nearly 37%. In New York City, where the President captured 15% of the Jewish vote in 1968, he received more than 50% in some precincts of the borough of Queens and averaged 39% citywide.

THE YOUNG: Less help than expected for McGovern.

McGovern strategists had counted heavily on piling up a huge majority among the nation's 25 million potential 18-to-21-year-old voters; some talked optimistically of a plurality as high as 3.5 million. But the results, as well as polls taken shortly before the election, seem to show that McGovern fell far short of his goal, even among college students, who compose only 30% of the new voters. Indeed, at a Republican victory rally in Washington on Election Night, President Nixon told a cheering crowd: "We won a majority of the votes of young America." Mc-Govern's mishandled and drawn-out abandonment of Thomas Eagleton and his belated attempts to patch up differences with old-line political leaders cost him the votes of many of his previously rabid college supporters. A Gallup poll taken a month before the election showed that McGovern's lead over Nixon on college campuses was a mere 49% to 47%.

Those results were not surprising to Warren Miller, head of the University of Michigan's national electoral studies program. Many politicians had made what he called "the simpleminded extrapolation that youth is radical and therefore it will vote very liberal or radical. Well, somebody forgot all about Western Illinois University and Washington State and Pepperdine. Radical students are a very small slice of the action."

That seemed to be the case in a precinct in Tuscaloosa, Ala., which has a large student population from the University of Alabama. That voting unit gave Nixon 65% to McGovern's 35%. However, McGovern did score well in many other college areas In a Chapel Hill, N.C., precinct, he took 65% of the vote, cast largely by students and faculty from the nearby University of North Carolina. To no one's surprise, San Francisco's Precinct 224, near the campus of radically oriented San Francisco State College, gave Mc-Govern an impressive 68.7% to Nixon's 28%.

THE SOUTH: Solid Republican now.

In the face of the combined opposition of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey won only one Southern state (Texas) in 1968 and gathered only 31% of the vote compared with 36% for Wallace and 33% for Nixon. It was the worst showing in the South by any Democratic presidential candidate since Reconstruction days. Having broken their Democratic voting habit, white Southerners found it relatively painless to go all the way this year. Without George Wallace's name on the ballot and with no opposition from McGovern, who had virtually given up on the South before the campaign began, Nixon won nearly seven out of every ten Southern votes. In precinct after precinct, it became obvious that the Wallace vote switched en masse to Nixon, completely ignoring McGovern. The trend was particularly noticeable in a district near Wetumpka, Ala., where farmers who had given Wallace 94.6% of the vote in 1968 turned this year to Nixon who received 93.7%.

*Including Italians, Slavs and other Southern and Eastern Europeans, most of them Catholic. *As he did among New York City's Puerto Ricans, whose Democratic presidential vote in one Bronx district dropped from 85% in 1968 to 75%

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