McCarthy Expected To Win I Pennsylvania Primary 1

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31662, 24 April 1968, Page 17

McCarthy Expected To Win I Pennsylvania Primary 1

(N.ZP.A.-Reuter—-Copyright) PHILADELPHIA, April 23. Senator Eugene McCarthy, an anti-Viet-nam war candidate, is expected to come out on top in the Pennsylvania Presidential primary election today. He is the only listed contender from his own party or the rival Republican Party. Some write-in votes are expected for the other three big names in the Democratic Party—Senator Robert Kennedy (who has his first face-to-face clash with Senator McCarthy in Indiana on May 7), Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (who may announce next week that he is a candidate), and President

Johnson, who has bowed out. But there has been no organised campaign to produce such write-ins.

Senator McCarthy’s national campaign organisers believe a vote of 200,000 of the more than 2,255,000 registered Democratic electorate would be a “significant showing.” They hope to corner 21 to 30 of the 108 Democratic national convention delegate seats up for filling.

But State Democratic Party leaders feel the national organisers are being deliberately conservative in their estimates. “The lid is off on the number of votes McCarthy can get,” one party spokesman said. "His campaign has been well organised and I would not be surprised to see McCarthy get half a million votes,” he added. The spokes-

man also forecast between 30 and 40 delegates for the national convention in Chicago later this year—would go to the Minnesota senator.

On the Republican side, the front-runner, Mr Richard Nixon, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller, of New York—-

who maintains he would only accept a draft at the Miami convention and will not campaign for the nomination—have both kept their names off the ballot.

This was in deference to Governor Raymond P. Shafer, running as a “favourite son" candidate.

Republican voters will also be electing 54 delegates to their national convention. A generally light turn-out is expected, with not more than 30 to 40 per cent of the State’s total of just over 5,145,000 electors (2,595,000 Republican registered voters) going to the polls.

In Cleveland, Ohio, last night, Senator McCarthy said that the recent report of the National Advisory Commission on civil disorders “may be the most important document in the history of the United States.” Later he spoke at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and gave a warning of a “growing and dangerous involvement of the military establishment in the domestic affairs of the United States.

“In the councils of government in Washington,” he said, “the Defence Department has for the last eight years overshadowed the Department of State in the formulation of American foreign policy. “When bishops in Vietnam say stop the killing in the name of God, when poets and artists say stop the killing in the name of humanity, then certainly we must say: in the name of America, this war must be stopped.”