Democrats in Front

After their political Geiger counter had picked up the clicks from last week's local elections across the U.S., the national chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties were ready with separate and distinct analyses. Glowed Democrat Paul Butler: "After making full allowance for local factors, there is no doubt that this has national significance. The vote yesterday was clearly a further vote of confidence in the Democratic Party." Grumped Republican Leonard Hall: "Tuesday's elections had no national significance. It is a mistake to read a national trend into these local elections in an off year."

The soundest interpretation, as usual, lay somewhere between. The Democrats won the elections, but it would have been surprising if they had not won. The congressional elections of 1954, which took both the House and the Senate away from the G.O.P., established that the Democratic Party has an edge when the issues are more local than national and when neither Dwight Eisenhower's name nor his Administration's record are directly at issue. Last week's results confirmed that political fact, and extended it slightly.

The fact that the Democrats elected a governor of Kentucky and a mayor of Philadelphia was no surprise, but in both cases the margins of victory were considerably bigger than anyone expected them to be. Democrats gained in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York, but not nearly so much as the Democratic administrations there had hoped to gain. Perhaps the most significant results came in weathervane Indiana, where Democrats scored their biggest victory ever in municipal elections. The only national issue that showed through in any of the elections was falling farm income, which had an effect in Kentucky and possibly in Indiana.

What all of last week's results added up to: there are still more Democrats than Republicans in the U.S.

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