Mid-term election, November 1978

I think we are too close to the muddled and atrocious massacre in Guyana to say much that would be clear or sensible about it.

For now, I'd like to say something about the recent election which I skipped last week because we were still coming out of the smoke and the rhetoric of it. I think I mentioned before what a mistake it is – and one very easy to make if you live in a parliamentary country – to assume that because it was a General Election to put in a new House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, it would therefore reflect sharply how the country feels about the Carter administration. This can happen when there's a very strong incumbent president who has committed the nation to something as radical, say, as Roosevelt's new deal, and if that president has spent his first two years shoving through bills that follow his general line, then certainly the country reacts one way or the other to that line. 

Just to make this as clear as possible, let me stay with the example of Franklin Roosevelt who came in in 1932 when America was in the pit of the Great Depression. It didn't matter a damn that, once in the White House, he went against everything he'd advocated and promised in his campaign – to reduce spending, to decentralise the government, to give more of it back to the state. The country was desperate by March 1933 when he was inaugurated. He knew it and he did exactly the opposite. He produced the strongest central government America had ever had. He poured out millions in federal money for everything – housing, welfare, employment, forestry, business loans, even a federal theatre. In fact he got through Congress a National Recovery Act, so-called, which is the closest America has ever come to National Socialism, whereby much of the Constitution was, in effect, suspended and we had compulsory – willingly compulsory – codes for every trade and industry. Government, you might say, by trade association. No strikes, no bargaining, minimum wages and fixed terms of employment starting with the basic industries and going down even to the conditions under which baggy-pants comedians and strippers could perform in the burlesque theatres. I still have a copy of the burlesque NRA code. It makes quaint and amazing reading. 

Roosevelt had, in these first two years, a Congress with a great many Republicans in it because neither they nor the country knew that when he got in he'd go violently into reverse. But his New Deal gave the country new heart and, in the 1934 mid-term election, the country reacted with great gratitude and the Democrats, Roosevelt's party, accordingly got a thumping majority. 

Well, since then we've always assumed that the test of how the country took to the new man would be revealed in the mid-term election – 'mid-term' meaning halfway between presidential elections. However, the political analysts, scientists as they dare to call themselves, have been working on the results of the past 20 years or so and have deduced a growing, strange trend. It's this. While an incumbent president naturally claims credit for any gains his party makes in the congressional elections, the country is, more and more, turning the mid-term election into a vast bargain basement in which there are hundreds of separate stalls peddling their own products, which are not manufactured by the White House or any other competing company. 

Roughly, you can say the mid-term election is a series of local elections, held on the same day. And of course it is that. But it's more than that. It's what we've come to call an election not on the single issue of how well or badly the man in the White House is doing but an election on single and different issues in different places, which may, or may not, have anything to do with the voters' opinion of, this year, Jimmy Carter. And, this year, in spite of the president saying that he, for one, would judge the results as a vote of confidence in him, in the result, it turned out he had little to do with it. 

You may remember how, when Mr Carter's popularity rating was very low, Democrats running for Congress actually got the word to the White House that they would rather he didn't appear at rallies and speak for them. Now normally, candidates, especially fairly unknown candidates, are tickled pink if they can get the president to come to their town but then we had the glory, as it seemed at the time, of Camp David. And a lot of Democratic candidates came a-begging for help from the hero. He went into as many as 29 states. The results show that he was neither much of a help nor much of a hindrance. 

I think there's one new thing that begins to explain why this was an election of single, local issues. Eons ago, California was the only state that put on the ballot not just the names of the candidates. So that when you voted for one of them you were voting also for what he or she believed in, California introduced the referendum on the ballot, on any or all of many burning, local issues. So, you could vote directly for, say, reduced property taxes and, at the same time, and for other reasons, vote for a man who was against reducing property taxes. 

The referendum, under different names, in some states called a 'question', in others a 'measure', in others 'a proposition', in California all of them, has now spread to 23 states and I'd like to look over some of the results to show what people in Oregon and Michigan, Massachusetts, Alabama, Florida, and so on, were really voting for with their hearts, no matter how many votes they gave to a man or a woman candidate. 

If there was one, single issue which leapt across state boundaries to take fire in many states, it was something very like California's famous, or infamous, Proposition 13 which, at a stroke, cut rates, property taxes by over 50 per cent and left California to raise money by other means for such essential services as police, firemen, schools, welfare, or to reduce these services – which it is now drastically starting to do. The governor said the other day that maybe two campuses of the University of California are going to have to shut down. 

Well, 17 states put up to the voters similar proposals to cut taxes or to limit their state's power to spend. In Oregon, only, did the whole proposition fail. In the other 16 states, they legalised new ways of assessing taxes or said new taxes must not increase faster than an increase in personal income, or created exemptions for some people (small or needy householders mainly) but also in Texas for large landowners on the presumption, I presume, that they needed a larger incentive to grow more crops and/or that they might strike oil and needed every possible break to produce the precious stuff. 

If there is national significance in the mere resolve of these 17 states to do something about cutting taxes, it is that high taxes are the most nagging, annual reminder of how ferociously inflation eats into savings. It's also a sign, to many commentators, that the huge middle-class, which in this country is, at the very least, three-quarters of the population, is turning conservative to the extent of wanting an end to massive public spending for public services. Make my home liveable at a decent price and the devil take the hindmost. Or, if you're a Jeffersonian: government begins at home and the less national government, the better. 

In the other 33 states, however, you'd have to be very daring or rash to find a national pattern. As always, in some states the race was between two profiles. I mean candidates with a rival, personal appeal. There was a rash or flurry of moral issues. Florida rejected a proposition that would have given absolutely equal rights to homosexuals in public service. This is bound to be appealed in the end, I should guess, to the Supreme Court because it touches on a constitutional matter. The constitution does not distinguish sexual preferences when it guarantees to all citizens, quote 'the equal protection of the laws'. And it certainly makes no distinction between equal and absolutely equal rights. 

California, on the other hand, rejected a proposition which would have permitted schools to fire teachers who were proven to be homosexual. 

Three states, seeing what legalised gambling has done to Atlantic City – encourage a takeover by the Mob and invited an invasion of pimps and prostitutes – rejected legalised gambling. 

On the whole, if we can say 'on the whole', California, perhaps because it has such a long tradition of referenda, may well be the state to watch if you want to know where America is going. California ballots often look like double lacrosse sticks or American tax forms, a densely printed mass of sections, subsections and alternatives, and a bewildering array of propositions on social issues. 'I was so busy,' said a Californian I know, 'so busy voting yes and no for propositions and measures, I forgot to vote for governor!' 

California, then, turned down one, literal, burning issue which is smoking up the whole country. It's the question of smoking in public. It's already prohibited in lifts, in buses, in theatres, auditoriums; the proposition wanted to extend it to restaurants, schools, many other public places. It lost, but it will come up again. In other states, the tobacco industry, of course, poured millions into publicity to see that it lost. 

The state of Missouri was the battleground for an issue that I suspect could grow and grow into a national conflict. It's what's called the Right to Work law. Some states have it; it's the right not to belong to a union. In other words, the right, if our industrial democracies can grant one, to illegalise the union shop. Well, in Missouri in 1978, the move failed. If there's to be a recession, it will obviously fail again but during the next wave of prosperity it will come up again in many more states if only because so many people, especially mobile people in search of jobs of their own choosing, look on our time, our day, rightly or stupidly, as the day of big labour, if not arrogant labour.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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