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Contrasting political personalities played a vital part in the election outcome—and had little to do with political affiliations or governmental philosophy. Idaho's Republican Senator Herman Welker lost to eager-to-please young Frank Church not so much because Welker was a diehard reactionary as because of his arrogant, voter-be-damned personality and campaign. The longtime clowning of Missouri's veteran (25 years) Republican Representative Dewey Short palled, at long last, on his constituents. They chose a lesser offender: a professional showman, Democrat Charles Brown, onetime producer of the radio program Grand Ole Opry. Even in machine-bossed Jersey City, voters clobbered an egregious clown, Democrat T. James Tumulty, a 330-lb. jolly boy with a penchant for posing for photographers in his underdrawers, and voted in Vincent J. Dellay.
Battered Bosses. All sorts of would-be political bosses suffered painful bruises at the hands of the freewheeling electorate. Chicago's once-mighty Democratic machine could not even put across its Cook County ticket. In industrial New Jersey, C.I.O. leaders backed nine Democratic congressional candidates; only three of them won. In one Democratic urban stronghold after another there seemed to be no sign of a dependable "delivered" vote this year.
The independence of the 1956 voter holds far-reaching political implications. No longer can state and local candidates count on election simply because their party has done a good job at the national level. In that sense, the idea of national party responsibility may have been weakened. At the same time, the idea of personal responsibility—on both the national and regional scenes—has been strengthened. With their parties unable to help them survive slipshod performance, state and local office holders must meet their individual tests at the hands of an electorate fully capable of judging them accurately. This is the crucial lesson of 1956 —and the one that will probably shape U.S. politics in the years to come.