The Evening Star (April 22, 1946)
Moley: Can GOP control Congress?
By Raymond Moley
Since tradition has consigned to chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees the ungrateful task of inspiring rather than informing, it has been customary to allow them a bit of poetic license. In short, they must keep up appearances and they have to say what they don’t believe or what nobody else believes. They must make claims which are reeking with hope, while their inner souls are swimming in despair.
Hence, B. Carroll Reece must make it seem as if a 1947 Republican Congress is practically in the bag. There are, he says, only 27 seats to capture. Several will be picked up in the border states; two or three will be found in the Deep South. And so on. All this, because there is a “tide” running against the Democrats.
I cannot argue about the “tide” part, although I have, in some traveling about, found no particular “tide” running in any direction. But if a Republican Congress is to be elected this fall, there will have to be more than a “tide.” It will have to be a tidal wave. And even the most optimistic find no evidence of anything of the sort.
It is not pleasant to set down these words of caution, for a Republican Congress might be a useful check on the present CIO-PAC-ridden administration. But facts are facts.
Mr. Bronson Batchelor of New York, an intelligent student of politics, has written, for private circulation, an analysis of what is involved in electing a Republican Congress. What he says makes a great deal of sense. Incidentally, Mr. Batchelor is a Republican and he would like nothing better than to see the Republicans back in power. But he is also a realist.
The Democrats, he points out, hold 103 seats in the South, and he does not believe the Republicans can take any of them. That leaves 109 Democratic seats in the North and 31 Democratic seats in the border states.
Mr. Batchelor points out, further, that a gain of 27 seats would not assure firm control of the House. At least 40 seats must be wrested from the Demo crats to assure a working majority.
This means that the Republicans must hold all they have and win from the Democrats approximately one-third of their Northern and border seats. The Republicans cannot hope to do this by picking up the rural seats here and there. They must crack directly into the big metropolitan centers, now controlled by Democratic bosses and by labor. There are 57 such seats, and for nearly 20 years Republicans have been losing, not gaining, city seats. They now have only 17.
The Republicans have, as Mr. Reece accurately points out, been winning back House seats almost consistently since the debacle of 1936. But they have won back normally Republican seats. They are now down to bedrock, and the digging will be harder. It is like the fat man who finds in reducing that the first 10 pounds are easy, but that positive agony attends the going after that.
Only two factors could break the difficult situation described above. The first would be a great panic or scandal. Neither is likely to break. The second would be an organized effort by the Republican Party, as intense, skillful and pervasive in all the districts of the North and border as the CIO-PAC put on in a few districts in 1944. Such a drive is simply not possible under the present Republican headquarters organization. It is better than it was, but it is far from being an effective fighting outfit.
Meanwhile, every resource useful in swinging votes in industrial districts is in the hands of Mr. Hannegan and the CIO-PAC. And nothing will be forgot ten this year. It would take a landslide to change the complexion of Congress, and no landslide is in slight.