When the U.S. woke up after the election with a ticket-splitting headache, many politicians and most pundits agreed with the hasty diagnosis of Fair-Dealing Columnist Thomas Stokes: "The personal victory of President Eisenhower dramatizes, by contrast, the increasing weakness of his party." This was a glib, convenient way of talking about Democratic congressional victories against the Eisenhower avalanche. But it was also a superficial and misleading explanation of an election that carried a deeper and vastly more significant meaning.
The true key to the 1956 election lay in the politically discriminating voter, better informed than ever before about personalities and issues. Long ago convinced that the presidential candidate of his choice would take care of such national issues as peace and prosperity, the voter exercised decisive power in choosing between state and local candidates without regard for party labels, political bosses or popular coattails. That voter changed all the equations of U.S. politics, for now and tomorrow.
Invaded South. The notion of the Republican Party (below Ike), as a wilting minority is statistically without base, even though both Ike and G.O.P. strategists were shocked that the avalanche did not sweep in a Republican House and Senate. East of the Mississippi no Democrat unseated a Republican House incumbent—and West of the Mississippi no Republican unseated a Democratic incumbent. Outside the South. Republicans carried at least 193 congressional districts; the Democrats carried fewer than 130. The Republicans cracked all traditionally Democratic ethnic and religious blocs except (amid the Israel crisis) the Jewish. In the South, every one of the five Southern Republican Congressmen held on to his seat. Ike rolled up a bigger popular vote in six Southern states than in 1952, and for the first time since the Civil War there was a genuine framework for a Southern two-party system.
But the memorable fact of 1956 was not that the Republican Party did badly or that the Democratic Party did well. It was that in state after state, district after district, town after town, voters ignored party affiliations to elect candidates of individual local merit (or to defeat candidates of individual demerit).
Thus, Pennsylvanians ousted Republican Senator James H. Duff, original Ike-man who had been a sulky, do-little Senator, in favor of personable Democrat Joseph Clark. But they gave Ike a smashing 592,000-vote plurality, and the G.O.P. regained full control of the state legislature. Similarly. Washington State re-elected popular Democrat Warren Magnuson to the Senate over Governor Arthur Langlie, on the basis of Maggie's generally hard work in the Senate and his shower of favors to his state from Washington, D.C.—but the state's hard-working Republican incumbents were returned to Congress from at least five of the state's six districts, and a controversial Democratic candidate for Superintendent of Public Instruction was crushed by 150,-000 votes. And one Ohio county (Lucas), with rare selectivity, voted Republican for President. Congressman, state treasurer and secretary of state, while favoring Democrats for U.S. Senator, governor, lieutenant governor and state auditor.