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Two sons of Harvard and of famous political families, both polished Democratic moderates, won election to open Southern seats. Tennessee's Albert Gore Jr., 36, whose father served three influential terms in the Senate, was an easy victor over a weak Republican candidate. West Virginia's John D. ("Jay") Rockefeller IV, 47, also faced a wobbly Republican opponent and had also been considered a shoo-in; yet TV network-news polls reported early Tuesday evening that Republican Businessman John R. Raese was winning. Rockefeller ended up winning by a margin of 4%. "I saw the Reagan coattails coming," declared Rockefeller, who lost his first gubernatorial election in the 1972 Nixon landslide.
But Rockefeller may have done himself some damage too. The surname means money, and he spent profligately on his campaign: more than $9 million, $7 million of it from his own funds. "Jay's spending was obscene," said Raese. A huge pro-Reagan turnout also cut into his margin. In all, Rockefeller is lucky that he faced Raese, 34, a political novice who made tactical blunders regularly.
Rockefeller's father-in-law, Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy, had a nip-and-tuck election night that did not end as well. Percy, who recently turned 65, was forcibly retired from the Senate after three terms. The onetime presidential prospect was upset by a thoughtful and tweedy downstate Congressman, Paul Simon, 55.
Like many aging Wunderkinder who never quite live up to early hopes for them, Percy seemed portentous more than profound. Although he enjoyed the limelight as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he was not much of a legislative craftsman. His fuzzy ideology finally left him without a political base. In the past, Percy had been attacked mainly from the right; this time, facing a strong liberal, he pitched himself as a Reaganite. Not only did he lose the votes of once sympathetic blacks and liberals, but New Right groups worked against his re-election out of spite for past heresies.
Simon, an author and former editor of the Troy (Ill.) Tribune, has represented a tough, grungy rural district for a decade. A prolabor liberal, he put together the late, great Democratic coalition: he captured Chicago's blacks, ethnics and liberal whites overwhelmingly, and a majority of the rural quasi-Southerners downstate. He may have been helped by an uptick in the state unemployment rate (to 9.4%) announced last week.
The Republicans lost another incumbent just across the Mississippi River in Iowa. Like Percy, Roger Jepsen, 55, may have been hurt by rural economic problems; the farm-debt crisis is severe. But Jepsen, a conservative first-termer, had plenty of problems of his own doing. Last year he claimed congressional immunity to beat a Washington traffic ticket, and in June the born-again Christian was forced to confess that he had applied for membership in a Des Moines spa-cum-brothel in 1978. Nor was Jepsen always solid on matters of substance. In 1981, he trumpeted his opposition to the Administration's sale of AWACS radar planes to the Saudis, then voted for the sale. He had vowed he would not vote to raise the federal debt ceiling, but then did so anyway.