Vintage Year for the Incumbent

IF the 93rd Senate, which convenes in January, can be expected to have a more liberal tilt, the balance in the House will move the other way--but ever so slightly. The Republicans had never seriously hoped to capture a House majority; that would have required a gain of 39 seats. But they did anticipate a gain of around 20 in the event of a landslide, which would have approached a standoff. Instead, with one congressional race still undecided, the G.O.P. had to settle for a gain of twelve.

Democrats who were willing to desert the party at the top of the ticket came home at the lower levels. In general, voters were remarkably kind to incumbents regardless of party. Across the country, fewer than a dozen Congressmen who had made it to the general election were unseated. From the grass roots looking up, the Nixon landslide in most districts was barely perceptible. One explanation may be that the electorate was reaching for stability and the familiar face; a conscientious Congressman makes sure that his features are well known.

Democrats were most successful when they kept their distance from George McGovern. John Kerry, 29, the attractive former leader of the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War, learned that hard lesson in the Fifth District of Massachusetts. A McGovern man, he sank $250,000 into an energetic campaign and was considered well ahead; he lost to Paul Cronin, 34, when an independent who was expected to split the Republican vote withdrew.

In terms of geography, the G.O.P. continued to nibble at the once-solid South. Republican David Treen, for instance, won in Louisiana to become that state's first G.O.P. Representative in a century. In other regions, Democratic majorities generally held firm. One of the more interesting races took place in New York's Westchester County. There the Republican establishment, starring Governor Nelson Rockefeller, attempted to defeat Congressman Ogden ("Brownie") Reid, once publisher of the old Herald Tribune, who recently switched to the Democrats. Even the President joined the effort. Reid's independent-minded constituents, however, stuck with their man.

Some of the more interesting contests round the country:

> No matter how the race for New York's 20th District came out, the loser was bound to be a liberal woman --but then so was the winner. Deprived of her original constituency by redistricting, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, 52, first tried to run for the 20th in the Democratic primary against a popular incumbent, William Fitts Ryan. She lost, but Ryan died shortly thereafter, and the Democratic Party chose Abzug as its candidate. Ryan's widow Priscilla immediately entered the race for her husband's seat on the Liberal ticket, and a bitter race was on. Ryan charged that Abzug is "not just a zero; she's a mi-nus." "Mickey Mouse," she said, "can do better." In return, Abzug claimed that her opponent had "no qualification for office," and was conducting a campaign of "vendetta and vindictiveness." The voters apparently agreed with Bella: they sent Abzug to Washington for a second term.

-- At times, the contest in Tennessee's Sixth District resembled a rehash of war games. Incumbent Democrat William Anderson, 62, made references to the fact that he had skippered the nuclear-powered Nautilus under the North Pole; Republican Challenger Robin Beard, 33, recently the state personnel commissioner, countered by noting that his Marine unit had handled the offshore recovery of a Gemini space shot. In the end, however. Beard won for far more prosaic reasons--the district had been redrawn to include 51,000 white, conservative voters, mostly from a Shelby County suburb appropriately named "Whitehaven."

-- In Georgia's Fifth District (Atlanta), Civil Rights Leader Andrew Young, 40, a black, edged out Republican Rodney M. Cook, 48, a state legislator and insurance broker. Once noted for his mediating abilities as the executive director of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Young had to tightrope-walk the busing issue throughout his campaign. While Cook said that he would support a constitutional amendment against busing, Young suggested that busing could be avoided by a careful redrawing of some zoning lines. With that kind of moderate stance, he grabbed enough of Atlanta's white vote to cut the presidential coattails on which Cook was riding.

> Even though he did not run for any office, George Wallace suffered a setback at the polls and in his own home county. In the race for Alabama's Second District seat, he put much of his prestige behind a little-known Democrat named Ben Reeves, the district attorney of Harbour County. His motive was not just neighborliness: Reeves, 36, argues his cases before George's brother, Judge Jack Wallace, and is married to Wallace's cousin. But Wallace's efforts could not overcome the advantages of incumbency, and Republican Congressman William Dickinson, 47, kept his seat.

> In a victory that surprised almost no one, State Senator Barbara Jordan, 36, defeated a white engineering designer and a Chicano socialist in the race to represent Houston's largely black 18th District. She will thus become the first black woman ever sent to Congress from the old Confederacy. An intelligent and politically shrewd lawyer, Jordan won respect in the state senate for helping to enact Texas' first minimum-wage bill and create a department for community affairs, designed primarily to deal with the problems of urban minorities. Her admirers, who include Lyndon Johnson, expect her to rival Shirley Chisholm as the nation's top spokeswoman for the black community.

-- One of the more respected Congressmen to be unseated was Chicago's independent-minded Democrat Abner Mikva, 46, the victim of redistricting, his own stand in favor of busing and his association with McGovern, whom he supported even before the Democratic convention. One of the earliest challengers to the organization of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Mikva had made his peace with the "boss." Mikva's Republican opponent, Sam Young, 49, a Chicago attorney active in local G.O.P. affairs, spoke out harshly against "the McGovern-Mikva brand of government," a gamble that paid off among the conservative voters along the North Shore. In winning. Young moved into his first public office.

> George McGovern lost not only his home state of South Dakota but, by proxy, one of its two congressional districts. A former McGovern staffer, Patrick McKeever, 36, who for six years was responsible for the Senator's constituent service and who mirrors McGovern on most major issues, was beaten by Republican James Abdnor, 49, a former state senator and Lieutenant Governor. Better known throughout the district, the rather folksy Abdnor managed to parlay the voters' mistrust of the McKeever-McGovern platform into a narrow victory.

> One of the brightest new faces to debut in the next Congress will belong to Denver Democrat Pat Schroeder, 32, a lawyer and housewife who wears her hair tied back with a bow, drives a Volkswagen and scorns set speeches. The mother of two, Schroeder claims that she entered the race because she was tired of "political pollution"--the rhetorical effluent that candidates disgorge every two years to get reelected. To add a breath of fresh air, she campaigned for congressional reform ("If business were run the same way Congress is, the country would be shut down"), stronger environmental controls and progressive property taxes. She won partly because her conservative Republican opponent, Incumbent James ("Mike") McKevitt, 44, did not take her seriously until it was too late. For a while, his doorbell ringers referred to her as "Little Patsy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.