PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION COULD EVERYONE BE WRONG BUT SENATOR McGOVERN?

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33068, 8 November 1972, Page 16

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION COULD EVERYONE BE WRONG BUT SENATOR McGOVERN?

(From the "New York Tones.” October 29, 1972) GVcir .>rk Times Neus Service. copyright 1972) ANAHEIM. California.—Walt Disney built an empire out of fatttl in it. at a campaign rally in the Disneyland Hotel here yesterday. Senator George McGovern declared that he would win the President) . It was not the first time the Democratic nominee had made the prediction. Not for another nine days will it be known if he. too. has been indulging in fantasy. But he is only one of two men who have staked their futures on a belief that the Gallup and Harris polls—which still show him trailing President Nixon by more than 2(1 percentage points have misread the Presidential electorate of 11*72.

The other man is Arthur Tobier. In New York tomorrow, Outerbridge and l.azard Inc. will publish a book in which Mr Tobier explains, perhaps prematurely. How McGovern Won the Presidency and Wh\ the Polls [Were Wrong” The thesis of the book and the hope of the McGovern candidacy as the Senator flatted across the country and back last week was that the polls had failed to detect a hidden current of support for the South Dakotan: Newly enfranchised youths only nowbeing energised to canvass and vote for Mr McGovern; Democrats who toyed with allegiance to the Republican President but are being drawn back home to their party’s nominee by his televised discussions of major issues; independents and even Republicans turning finally (against Mr Nixon because of political sabotage ascribed to the re-election campaign.

Air of unreality To political professionals, including some in the Senator’s entourage, it had the air of unreality. Senator Edmund S. Muskie of Maine introduced Mr McGovern at a rally in Pennsylvania by praising his campaign “against hopeless odds.” Newsmen on the campaign plane wrote musical ditties containing words such as “futile.” One McGovern aide went so far as to suggest that the recent illness of the Senator’s wife, Eleanor, was due as much to dejection as to fatigue. Until last Monday, the candidate himself seemed infected with despondency. He snapped at reporters to “show a little maturity” when their minor dispute with an overly zealous fire marshal interrupted a speech in Los Angeles. And in a speech to a black group in the BedfordStuyvesant ghetto in New York on October 19, he made this plaintive plea for help:

“No matter what happens on November 7, I’m still going to be a United States Senator. My future will be secure. It’s not my head that’s on the line, it’s yours.” But suddenly last week the Senator’s confidence seemed restored by massive crowds and an inundation of mail to his Washington headquarters bearing as much as $BOO,OOO a day in small contributions prompted by television addresses on the war, the economy and —on Wednesday—“corruption” in the Nixon Administration.

Anne Wexler, by nature pessimistic, reported to Mr McGovern her elation that the voter registration drive she directed had signed up 5.5 million persons in the seven big states that contain nearly enough electoral strength to determine the outcome.

Concentrated campaign The Senator’s campaign has been concentrated in 20 key states—lB of which, with a total of 276 electoral votes, a bare 6 more than the required majority, Mr Tobier foresaw Mr McGovern carrying—and in at least some of them the Democrats sensed a shift taking place. In microcosmic Ohio, Eugene P. O’Grady, the liaison between the governor’s office and the McGovern campaign, said on Tuesday that “it’s I beginning to come together. I’m not ready to predict! we’ll carry Ohio,” he said as the Senator addressed a large, crowd in Dayton, “but I may be in another week.” Mrs Wexler professed to be convinced, based on the; registration of 1.5-million new voters in Texas, that the tide was turning there. “They are all our people,” she said. “If we can get them out, there’s no way we can lose Texas.”

In Detroit, where the Senator stopped off on Wednesday, the Democratic volunteers were gleeful at the discovery of a letter from Jack Gribbs, Mr Nixon’s state campaign chairman, which asserted: “President Nixon’s lead in Michigan has been slipping steadily for the last two months. Furthermore, the commitment by many of those who still tell pollsters they favour the President is not strong.” Representative Clement( Zablocki of Wisconsin, a I (Vietnam hawk who had been| (disdainful of the McGovern; (candidacy from the outset,! (got out of a hospital bed ini Milwaukee to greet the Presi-; dential candidate at the air-j i port on Tuesday. Even the disclosure by the (White House on Thursday: that the United States and North Vietnam were on the verge of a settlement of the war did not seem to daunt Mr McGovern. He told 15,000 exuberant students at the University of lowa that he prayed the peace initiative would bear fruit but added that “the question that' haunts my mind this afternoon is this—Why, Mr Nixon, (did you take another ‘four more years’ to put an end to this tragic war?” Mr McGovern’s attitude seemed to have been summed up in New York on Monday, when he told campaign

workers. '‘l'm going to make a prediction here tonight that the people with the reddest faces the day after the election are going to be these public opinion polltakers." The Gallup Poll took pains to point out. as it described a 59-36 edge for the President on Wednesday, that Hubert Humphrey gained 11 percentage points in the last two weeks of the 1968 campaign. What made that recollection significant was the fact that Mr McGovern’s strategy has been based not on the presumption he could overtake Mr Nixon on a nation-wide basis but on the belief that he could surpass the President in enough selected states in the East. Middle West and West, where Mr Nixon’s margin is believed to be much smaller, to win the election. And there were a few modest glimmers of hope for the Senator that he has been correct in assuming that some of his support in those areas is hidden among voters who might not want to admit to a pollster that they favour a candidate destined, according to the polls, to lose. Adam Clymer of the “Baltimore Sun” reported that in Fremont, Ohio, passersby he canvassed on a down-town street were divided 16-12 in Mr Nixon’s favour. But when he inquired at voters’ homes, where identities could be readily established, the President’s margin was an incredible 16-2.

A journalist tn Chicag posed as a polltaker an asked 21 persons he knet were campaign workers fo Mr McGovern how the planned lo vote Only fou would name the Democrat! candidate. The Senator’s own pollin. c insultant. Patrick A Caddel was said to hate learned i another test that when a assistant carrying a seale ballot box went to the sam homes that his interviewer had polled earlier withou making the tails secret th result came out 9 per cen more favourable to Mr Me Govern. It may turn out to has been wishful thinking, bu Mr McGovern told his Uni versity of lowa audience tha if voters would consider th threat to individual libert represented by the alleged Re publican wiretapping an sabotage campaign. “I hat ■no doubt that no matter wha i these polls happen to say thi afternoon we're going to hav an entirely different result i the poll on November 7.”