THE SHAPE OF THE VOTE

THE 1968 presidential race," Pollster George Gallup declared last month, "may go into the record books as the one that shattered more traditional voting patterns than any other election of this century."

For months, dissidents of the pro-Wal-lace right and antiwar left threatened to fragment the nation's two-party alignment. The Alabamian, it was feared, would sunder the New Deal coalition of labor, Negroes and ethnic minorities by luring away hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers; disaffected Dem-ocrats--and most Negroes--would sit out the election in disgust or apathy. Richard Nixon predicted confidently that a "silent center" would rise up with an overwhelming mandate for the Republican Party.

It did not turn out quite that way-- and an even greater surprise was the extent to which the vote generally followed more traditional party lines. Instead of the convulsive upheaval that many had foreseen, the election was unpredictably normal in several important respects. Up to a point, the voting patterns followed those of 1960; the Democrats drew their strength largely from the big industrial states of the Northeast, plus Michigan, West Virginia, Minnesota and Texas. Richard Nixon, as he had eight years ago, attracted the Republican faithful of the suburbs. He carried virtually the same Midwestern states that he had won against John Kennedy, as well as the entire Far West and several peripheral Southern states, including Florida, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

George Wallace, the dreaded unknown factor, proved to be primarily a sectional candidate after all. His major impact was confined to the Deep South, where, as expected, he and his running mate, Curtis LeMay, carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia. Nowhere in the industrial Northern states did he wrench away a massive blue-collar vote. In Boston's working-class districts, for example, Humphrey tallied 74% of the vote to Wallace's 24%. In poorer white sections of Detroit, pre-election Wallace partisans flocked back to the Democratic Party, joining Negroes, suburban whites and elderly voters to swing Michigan's 21 electoral votes to Humphrey by 151,-000 votes. Many Wallaceites also defected in Southern and Border states upon which he had counted. "They all talked hard," said Republican State Chairman Bill Murfin of Florida, "but the softness was there, and in the last two weeks of the campaign they just melted away."

Philadelphia Story. One positive effect that Wallace did exert was to help turn out the Negro vote. Throughout the campaign, many dissident blacks had urged a boycott of the presidential elections as a gesture of frustration and contempt for the entire political system. In Newark, Detroit, New York, Boston and Los Angeles, the threat of Wallace persuaded at least some Negro voters to try to neutralize the white backlash vote by supporting Humphrey. In Philadelphia, Negroes in the north-side ghetto allied with Jewish voters--who went in great numbers for Humphrey throughout the U.S.--and some upper-middle-class whites to give Humphrey a 270,000 plurality. It was enough to offset Nixon's gains elsewhere in Pennsylvania and carry the state's 29 electoral votes for the Democrats. Roughly 90% of registered Negroes turned out in some areas. Throughout the South, where one-third of the region's 3,250,000 Negro voters were participating in a presidential election for the first time, balloting was heavy.

In much of the nation, however, the Negro turnout fell somewhat below the level of 1964, when the fear of a Goldwater victory brought a record 6,048,000 to the polls. This year, Hubert Humphrey received some 83% of Cleveland's Negro vote, where L.B.J. had collected nearly 95% four years ago. If Negroes were generally less than enthusiastic about Richard Nixon, many did not seem to fear him quite enough to get to the polls.

Tug of Allegiance. Expectedly, the nation's suburbs went heavily Republican in general, although in the East the G.O.P. failed to muster the 60% to 62% majorities that it customarily receives in vintage years. The spread between the Republicans and Democrats in New York's Nassau County, usually one of the Republicans' biggest plurality counties in the nation, was only some 10%. Young professionals and white-collar workers were also considerably less inclined to vote Republican this year, especially those living in urban centers.

In some large Northern cities such as Buffalo and Detroit, Middle and Eastern European ethnic groups surprisingly eschewed Wallace and split their votes fairly evenly between Humphrey and Nixon. They reflected the tug of allegiance between the Democrats' traditional support of the working man and the Republicans' more militant stand on the issue of law and order. Middleclass Catholic families that abandoned the G.O.P. to vote for John Kennedy eight years ago were largely back within the Republican fold. The nation's women voters, partly because of the bombing halt, tended to favor Humphrey."

The Democrats, of course, had substantial support from numerous dissidents who had sworn after the Chicago convention that they would never vote for Humphrey. As the campaign wore on, they evolved a sort of tentative sympathy and affection for the Vice President that was only sharpened by their accumulating distaste for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. In the last month of the campaign, former Mc-Carthy workers, especially those old enough to recall Humphrey's earlier, fiery days in the Senate, began soliciting support and wearing H.H.H. buttons. They even became intolerant of McCarthyites who refused to join them. Some question remained of how badly Humphrey was hurt by dissident Democrats who stayed away from the polls as a protest. But the nonvote was not the significant factor. If the election did not represent a triumph of the New Politics, it was still the most massive single exercise of participatory democracy in the nation's history.

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