The Pittsburgh Press (September 22, 1944)
Background of news –
The transient vote
By Jay G. Hayden
San Francisco, California –
The biggest single question mark in this 1944 presidential contest is the roving industrial vote, and nowhere is this element of uncertainty more in evidence than in Oregon and Washington, which Governor Thomas E. Dewey has just visited.
Literally hundreds of thousands of new people have been drawn into the teeming war industries of these states. Henry Kaiser alone has approximately 90,000 employees in his three shipyards in the twin cities of Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington.
Mr. Kaiser has brought men from New York by scores of trainloads and the draft of workers from the Deep South has been even greater. Portland’s Negro population has jumped from 1890 to 30,000. That city’s overall increase is placed at 175,000 and Seattle’s even higher.
The political point is that President Roosevelt’s greatest strength always has been among the factory workers and, in consequence, the great influx of these into Oregon and Washington should make them a Democratic cinch.
Many transients not registered
The disturbed circumstance from the Democratic standpoint is that the increased population is not reflected in the registration figures.
Multnomah County, containing Portland, has a trailer registration booth that travels from factory to factory to enable the workers to register. There, as in all other war production centers, Sidney Hillman’s CIO Political Action Committee is putting on a vigorous campaign to induce labor union members to qualify for voting. But registration figures for Multnomah County, released on Tuesday, disclosed no appreciable increase over either 1940 or 1942.
This year’s total is 180,962. On the same date in 1940, the total was 180,833 and in 1942, 177,903.
In Washington, the registration in 1940 was about 990,000. It fell to 700,000 in 1942 and now has climbed back to only 890,000, still 100,000 less than when Mr. Roosevelt was elected for his third term.
The facts seem to be that at least half of the imported workers are unable to qualify because of an insufficient period of residence or other cause, and many even of those entitled to vote are disinclined to do so.
At the Kaiser plants presently the net decline in employment is 2,500 a month and the turnover – that is, the number moving out and in – is much greater. Whether they are coming or going, the nomads are unlikely to be able to vote.
Poll tax feared
The most astonishing circumstance, reported in both Portland and Seattle, is that a lot of war workers refuse to register. Some of the boys from down South, both white and Negro, believe that voting will make them liable to a poll tax and no amount of explaining that these western states have not now, and never have had, such a tax, seems able to disabuse them of this notion.
Principally on the basis of the scant registration of war workers, Republicans question the reliability of the Gallup Poll, which shows Mr. Roosevelt leading by a ratio of 55 to 45 in Washington and California and 51 to 49 in Oregon. The assumption of those who disbelieve this finding is that those polled include city workers, in proportion to their total, rather than the number of them who are registered.
It is pointed out that almost all elections, since 1940, have shown a marked decline in votes cast and that, generally, the smaller the vote the greater the Republican trend.
Wherefore the Dewey backers are hoping that enough workers will stay away from the polls for one reason or another to turn these Pacific Coast states to their man on Nov. 7.