APATHETIC ELECTION
By EDWARD MONTGOMERY
THE American election campaign is almost over. Technically the result will be decided on November 2nd, and as to its nature all the prophets are dogmatic. Governor Thomas E. Dewey, of New York, will receive x million votes—a plurality, if not indeed an actual majority, of the popular vote—and his election as next President of the United States will be confirmed by an overwhelming majority of the votes in the Electoral College. Mr. Harry S. Truman will receive y million votes—several million less than Mr. Dewey. Mr. Henry Wallace will receive z million votes. And Governor Thurmond, Mr. Norman Thomas and others will divide the residue. In actual fact, of course, virtually everything about the 1948 Presidential Election, except the actual number of votes cast and the names of the candidates to receive them, was decided by the American people by last spring. As long as six months ago it was apparent to almost every political observer in the United States that the broad mass of the American people had made up its collective mind that there must be a change of Administration in Washington this autumn. They had had sixteen years of Democratic rule, and sixteen years, they had decided, would be quite enough.
After the Democratic Convention last summer,. which with the greatest unenthusiasm nominated Mr. Truman as the Party's candi- date, I wrote that unless the issue of improving the civil status of negroes were injected into the election campaign, it would probably be one of the most apathetic of modern times. All the parties, with the exception of Governor Thurmond's " Dixiecrats," have steered very carefully shy of it. Even Mr Truman himself, who originally forced the issue on the special session of Congress in August, has wisely kept very quiet about it. And, as things have turned out, the historians will probably set down the 1948 election as the most apathetic ever held. This apathy may well have the effect of pro- ducing one of the smallest totals of popular votes in recent times. Many thousands will stay away from the polls out of sheer boredom, knowing the result to be a foregone conclusion A good many other thousands, and among these the more intelligent and progressive sections of the American electorate, may stay away because they are disgusted with all of the candidates, and will vote for none of them. Few will go to the polls in any mood of flaming enthusiasm for the party or the candidate for whom they are voting.
The apathy is mainly, I believe, due to a combination of two factors, one of them hopeful, the other discouraging. The dis- couraging factor is the exhibition by all the candidates in the cam- paign of an almost total lack of those qualities of political leadership and the ability to arouse popular support for his policies which a man must have to be a great President of the United States. And never so sorely as now has the United States—and the world—needed a great President. The hopeful factor is the demonstration which the campaign has given of the extent to which the American people are united in their support of the present foreign policy. There is virtually only one dominating and over-riding issue in the minds of the American people today: the international situation and the policy that has been framed to deal with it. Over a period of three years that policy has been hammered out between the leaders of the two major parties, has been accepted by the American people, and now commands their overwhelming support. There is virtually no opposition of any importance to it in any class or section of the American public, from top to bottom, from extreme Right to medium Left. Only the extreme Left, taking their line from Moscow, are opposed. But, since whichever major party wins the election is committed to carry forward the policy which the American people have approved on the one issue they are seriously concerned about, interest in the election itself is naturally low.
All this is not to say that the actual results of the elections next week, in terms of the proportions of votes cast and the personalities elected, may not be of very considerable importance, both to America domestically and internationally to the world at large. For example, there is no doubt whatever in my mind that the Soviet leaders have been watching very closely the progress of Mr. Henry Wallace's campaign for evidence of disunity or dissension in America on funda- mental policy which would strengthen their hand in dealing with the United States Government on the international diplomatic level. Soviet newspaper and news agency representatives earlier in the summer were sending to Moscow highly exaggerated reports of the strength of Wallace's following, based on the findings of an alleged " secret " public opinion poll of very doubtful authenticity. They were at that time writing of the possibility of Wallace receiving 52 to 15 million votes in the election. If the most recent predictions of the more reliable polls are fulfilled, and Wallace receives only two million votes or thereabouts—or only four per cent, of the probable total popular vote—it should have a distinctly chastening effect on those in the Kremlin who, failing the arrival of the eagerly- desired American depression, had been counting on Wallace to sap the firmness of the American attitude towards Russia.
Of greater long-term importance to Americans themselves will be the distribution of the popular vote as between the Republicans on the one hand, and the three factions of the Democrats—the Centre represented by Mr. Truman, the Right represented by Governor Thurmond, and the Left represented by Mr. Wallace—on the other. If the Right and Left Wings succeed together in taking enough votes away from the Democratic Centre represented by Mr. Truman and thereby make the plurality of Republican votes for Mr. Dewey disproportionately large as compared with those cast for Mr. Truman, they may kill the Democratic Party as it has been known for over a hundred years beyond hope of resurrection. If that should happen, the Republicans will be in for a long period of undisputed rule, with the opposition to it gradually emerging on one of two possible lines. One, the formation of a wholly new second party, probably cohering around the labour union movement as its hard core, and developing along class-conscious proletarian lines like the European labour movements. The other, the formation of a number of " splinter " parties which, by gradual accretions of strength from dissatisfied Republicans and by coalitions and com- binations among themselves also on the approved European model, might hope eventually to wrest power from a weakening Republican Administration. Either of these would be an unhappy development in America, whose Constitution has been so successfully adapted to the workings of the two-party system that it has become almost impossible to imagine the continued observance of the one without the practice of the other.
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