ELECTION HOPES.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 256, 28 September 1932, Page 7

ELECTION HOPES.

POLITICS IN UNITED STATES. “As goes Alaine, so goes the Union.” The old slogan is an exploded legend in. these days; nevertheless the Republican party is gloomy and depressed because a Democrat, Air Louis Brann, has been elected Governor of the State along with two of the three Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives (says a New York message). All three of them are “wets” on the prohibition issue. The State of Alaine has been “rock-ribbed Republican” since 1914. It was the pioneer “dry” State. It has “voted Republican” since 1876, and in the 1924 and 1928 elections, with an unusual swing away from the Democrats, the Repubr lican majority was more than 90,000. The election in Alaine is the first voting expression of public sentiment on the major questions of the stagnation of trade and prohibition. These were the overshadowing issues, but alleged Republican “trickery” aroused the wrathful opposition of unusually loyal Republicans. In one city, the Republicans revived an _ obsoletepauper law which disfranchised victims of the “depression.” President Hoover recently, sent his right-hand man, Air Ogden Mills, Secretary to the Treasury, to Alaine with several Senators to take part in the election campaign. The president feared the psychological effect of his own prospects for re-election if the State were lost.

The Democrats feel that they have a fine chance of victory at the Presidential election in November, but they realise that campaign strategy and tactical blunders by either side are capable of influencing the result.