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11 to 12 O'Clock. New England was as solid for the G.O.P. as the South had once been for the Democrats. Even in Democratic Boston Stevenson's lead was pared to 23,000 votes (v. his 68,000-vote margin in 1952), a fraction of the total he needed to counterbalance G.O.P. strength elsewhere in Massachusetts. Ike swept ahead in New Hampshire, seized a 36,000-vote lead in Rhode Island (which he later increased to nearly ten times his 1952 plurality). Bustling ahead in New York City, which the Democrats carried by some 350,000 votes in 1952, Ike was stitching up a powerful statewide lead. At 11:25, with firm victories in ten states, the G.O.P. avalanche overtook wavering Michigan. At G.O.P. headquarters in Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel, Ike started planning his TVictory speech of thanks.
Adlai still clung to a narrow lead in Minnesota and Oklahoma. Stevenson carried Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia, but seemed likely in each case to end with narrower margins than in 1952. An irony of G.O.P. gains in the South was that they came largely from segregation-conscious white voters, while the G.O.P.'s civil-rights record was winning over Negro votes from Memphis to Miami.
Returns trickling in from the Western and Mountain states put the G.O.P. in the lead from the outset in Arizona, Colorado and Utah, New Mexico gave Ike a heavy lead. Even atom-conscious Los Alamos, one place where Stevenson's H-bomb issue might logically have set a fuse, went for Eisenhower.
12 to 1 O'Clock. The Eisenhower pluralities kept pounding in like the surf. "How long, O Lord, how long!'' muttered a New York Stevensonite, in wry memory of the 1956 Democratic keynote speech. The answer seemed to be: until the last returns from the Coast. West Virginia came in for Eisenhower, voting Republican for the first time since going for Hoover against Smith in 1928. Los Angeles waited for San Francisco to record a slight margin for Stevenson (ascribed by West Coast commentators in part to Nixon's unpopularity there), then slapped it down with a smart plurality for Ike and Dick. With a jolt, South Carolina Democrats noted that they had carried the state for Stevenson only because Republicans (with 73,000) and independents voting for Virginia's Senator Harry Byrd without his authorization (86,000) divided among them a total big enough to exceed the Democratic vote. On behalf of his favorite son, Estes Kefauver, Politico J. Howard McGrath began a small salvage operation in Washington. Kefauver, he said, emerges from the carnage unscarred and running hard—"He's going in '60.'' Otherwise, said McGrath with an Irish grin: "It's a regular wake. We're lucky we still have the corpse."
1 to 2 O'Clock. Lurching into Kentucky Democratic headquarters at Louisville's Seelbach Hotel, a lonely soul with an Adlai button inquired thickly: "Are you all Democrats?" Came the reply: "What's left of us." What was left of the Democrats was at best seven states with 74 electoral votes.