(See Cover)
Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency of the U.S. in a ballot-box revolution.
The size of the vote was impressive in itself, 55% of the popular vote, 38 states (with Kentucky, Missouri and Louisiana still in doubt 18 hours after the count began) and at least 429 of the 531 electoral votes.
More impressive than the number of votes was the revolutionary quality that appeared when the details of the balloting were set side-by-side with the issues of the campaign and the state of the nation in which the campaign was waged.
In a time of unprecedented prosperity, with 62.5 million men & women at work, the voters repudiated the party in power—repudiated an administration which held the awesome political leverage of a $80 billion-a-year budget. The Democrats frankly fought the campaign on the pocketbook issue: "Don't let them take it away." To the last, in spite of all that Ike and his friends could say, an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that the Democratic Party "was better for them personally" in an economic sense than the Republican Party.
The people did what materialists and cynics say people never do: voted against what they believed to be their immediate economic interests.
Certainly, Ike made vast headway in his sincere (and highly feasible) promises to maintain and extend the New Deal's gains and to revive faith in progress through free enterprise. But he did not win the campaign on economic issues.
It was fought and won on transcendent issues of morality: 1) clean government, 2) government for all the people and not for special groups, and 3) government that would express in foreign and domestic policy the moral beliefs that lie at the root of U.S. life and greatness.
Under the last heading comes the question of softness to Communism, of which the confused deadlock of the Korean war was the most persuasive symptom and the Alger Hiss case was the most clinically revealing symptom.
Issues of this kind touched Americans of all classes—and the vote on Tuesday reflected the judgment of all classes. He did not win by breaking away one or two groups from the amazing coalition built by Franklin Roosevelt. He won by gaining appreciable numbers of Democrats in almost every group. Among them:
1) Farmers, who had never had it so good, shifted to Ike by the hundreds of thousands on Korea and kindred issues.
2) Big-city industrial workers, wooed for 20 years by the Democrats, turned by the millions to the Republican candidate.
3) Roman Catholics, long a mainstay of the Democratic Party, moved away from a party that did not seem to understand the moral danger of Communism.
4) Southerners, weary and appalled at the growing bureaucracy of Washington, left the party of their fathers.
5) Young men shifted, partly because they thought it time for a change.
6) Women, reacting against the Korean deadlock, swarmed to Ike.
Never has a people looked so critically at a superficially successful present and voted so overwhelmingly for a more solidly based future.