The South

Republicans did amazingly well in the Solid South. They held on to their only seat in North Carolina, retained two of their three places in Virginia, and upset Democrats in Texas and Florida. For the region as a whole, therefore, the G.O.P. showed a net gain of one seat.

In 1952 Dwight Eisenhower was on the ticket, and anti-Trumanism was at fever pitch in Virginia. Republican Joel Broyhill won then by 322 votes in his Washington suburban district; this time he won by 4,500. Republican Richard Poff won his Lynchburg-Roanoke district by 2,000 in 1952; this year his margin was 13,000. Republican William Wampler won his Bristol district by 2,300 in 1952; this time he lost by 1,000 in the face of an all-out effort by the powerful Byrd organization. Even in Richmond, a relatively weak G.O.P. candidate came within 5,000 votes of unseating a Democrat.

Not since Reconstruction days had Florida elected a G.O.P. Representative. William C. Cramer came close in 1952 in the Tampa-St. Petersburg district, lost out only on the count of absentee ballots--and never stopped running. This time he made it. Hillsborough County (Tampa) is normally Democratic and has a population of 249,000--of whom only 33,890 took the trouble to vote. Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) is Republican. Its population is 158,000--and 61,000 voted. Result: a 1,600-vote edge for Cramer.

In Texas, the time-tested Democratic campaign principle is to ignore Republican candidates. But this year the G.O.P.'s Bruce Alger refused to be ignored. He campaigned so busily that he even wandered into his opponent's own office in search of votes. Alger, 36, is a former Princeton footballer and World War II bomber pilot. His wife was a Nieman-Marcus model. Even when his lead was safe, Alger could not forget that he was a Republican running in Texas. Said he: "Don't count me in yet--I don't want to be presumptuous."

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