Illinois crucial in presidential race

For many weeks now the politicians and the columnists and the television commentators have been saying that the presidential primary election in Illinois might be decisive in isolating the two men from whom, in November, the voters would choose the president.

I'd better say at once that nothing is decisive until the delegates of the 50 states meet in their conventions in the summer and pick their men.

Too much has happened in the past, and the recent past, between the primary victories and the conventions to lay safe bets on any one man, or any two men. But the Illinois primary which took place on Tuesday was seen as a crucial trial heat for the three men left in the Republican race – Reagan, Bush and Anderson – and the two men left in the Democratic race, Carter and Kennedy. Why should this be so?

Well, I've been desperately fishing in my mind for an analogy in sport that is not golf and some people will rejoice to hear that I've found one. Everybody knows that in the draw for the FA Cup it's a great advantage to play on your home ground. Well, in Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy was on his home ground and beat Carter. New Hampshire and Vermont were thought to be his alternative home grounds, being New England states with a prejudice in favour of native New Englanders, but he lost to Carter there. He didn't bother much with Georgia and Alabama which are southern states and, inevitably, Carter's home ground and Kennedy lost badly there.

But Illinois is neither northern nor southern – the heart of the middle west – the fifth largest state, sometimes called 'the big average state' meaning it is a typical, archetypal mixture of industry and agriculture, blacks, whites, Catholics, Jews, WASPS, the whole melting pot.

Down-state, the farming country is on the whole conservative. Chicago, where about a quarter of the whole 11 millions live tends, or has tended, to be liberal. It was Chicago that put Illinois over for Franklin Roosevelt four times, Truman his one time, John Kennedy his time, Lyndon Johnson his once, and this Democratic bias has always been attributed to the efficiency, often the ruthless efficiency, of the Democratic political machine over which, for so long, Mayor Richard Daley presided. But Mayor Daley is dead and gone and on the showing of last Tuesday, his successor, the Irish American lady, Jane Byrne, has nothing like the same control, though she forsook President Carter and endorsed Senator Kennedy some time ago.

The political pros did not expect her to carry anything like Mayor Daley's weight. Among other things, she's made herself unpopular by defying the city firemen in a long strike – settled, I may say, just before the primary. Even so, most pros who know Illinois well and Chicago better were looking to Tuesday's primary as THE crucial test of Senator Kennedy's national appeal because of Chicago's liberal tradition, because there's a machine backing Kennedy to enforce it and because Senator Kennedy's battle hymn in this campaign has been an echo of the old fighting songs of the Democrats in their liberal heyday. His standard speech might have come from Lyndon Johnson in 1964, some of it from Harry Truman in 1948 and it's rhetoric from Franklin Roosevelt any time.

Kennedy has talked at all times about his concern for the poor, for the blacks, for the old on pensions. He wants wage and price controls, he wants a full-blown national health – that is, say, national sickness – programme. He sees the oil companies as something not unlike the old robber barons. He's leapt on the president's blunder over the switched vote in the United Nations which had the United States supporting a resolution to forbid Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and then quickly saying it hadn't meant to vote that way. Senator Kennedy has declared this to be a shocking betrayal of Israel which is to say, for his campaigning purposes, a betrayal of the Jewish vote in this country. There's a very sizeable Jewish vote in Illinois. There are in Chicago a great number of blacks, there are many poor people, there are very many Catholics.

So, Illinois might not be his native ground but Chicago appeared to be his spiritual home, his ideological stamping ground. What happened?

First, I should explain that Illinois is one of the few states with primaries that has what is called 'a crossover vote'. In most states, the people who vote in the primaries are either registered Republicans or registered Democrats. When they go into the polling booth, they pick up the ballot of their party and vote twice, once for the man they prefer for president and then for a slate of delegates pledged to vote at the convention for a particular man.

However, in Illinois, the so-called 'crossover' custom allows you to vote on any ballot you choose. You can go in as a registered Democrat and if you don't like either Carter or Kennedy, you can vote for a Republican as your presidential preference. This procedure scrambles the voters loyalties and makes it all the harder to draw any national conclusions, for what it does is to give a candidate quite a sizeable popular vote as your choice for president but it doesn't follow that your choice is going to get a proportionate number of delegates to the convention.

In other words, a lot of people might vote for Kennedy as their choice over Carter but, on the delegate vote, more people might still vote for the pledged Carter delegates. That's what happened! That and worse for Kennedy.

Carter got 65 per cent of the popular vote in the so-called 'beauty contest'. Kennedy got only 30 per cent but Carter wound up with eight times the number of Kennedy's delegates. Kennedy himself did not care to offer an explanation for this debacle but the election analysts – the computer statisticians, rather – they had several answers, all of them devastating to the morale and the prospects of the Kennedy campaign.

Kennedy, the black man's friend, did badly among the blacks. Kennedy, the ancestral Irish Catholic, did badly among the Catholics. Among the Jews, well, there's one town in Illinois which is almost a symbolic immigrant town, it's called Skokie, a fairly new town built on drained marshland. It's heavily populated with German and Polish Jews who suffered in Nazi concentration camps, many of whose families were murdered there.

Skokie followed other Jewish districts in coming out two to one for Carter and, in spite of the palpable fact that inflation is the first, the raging, issue in the country and in spite of the proof of the polls that most people don't think Carter's new budget message will arrest inflation, Carter won – among the poor, the whites, the blacks, the Jews, the rich, the farmers, north, east, south and west. Quite apart from this stunning damage he's done to Kennedy's candidacy, the Carter victory in itself is a political puzzle.

As I talk, adding up the results of the ten primaries so far, Carter has 496 delegates and Kennedy 198. There are, however, 28 primaries still to go, five of them with massive gifts of delegates – New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and California but only New York is looked on a possible hunting ground for Kennedy votes. New York's primary is next Tuesday and if Kennedy loses there, surely his cause is done for.

There's just one other curious note to mention about the analysis of the Illinois Democratic vote, or rather two notes. One is that even among the Democratic voters who backed Kennedy's plea for wage and price controls, 61 per cent voted for Carter. The other note, a sombre one, is more telling still. A statistical sample was taken of the Democrats who either didn't vote for Kennedy or didn't like Carter and crossed over to vote Republican, something like one in three of these people said they couldn't vote for Kennedy because they didn't trust him. An alarming high number of them simply spoke one word, 'Chappaquiddick'.

On the Republican side, Illinois added a fifth to the four straight primaries won by Ronald Reagan. The Republicans started out in the primaries with seven campaigning candidates – Reagan, George Bush, ex-CIA head, ex-US representative in Peking, ex-ambassador to the United Nations, the jaunty little liberal Republican congressman John Anderson, Robert Dole of Kansas, Philip Crane, another congressman, Senator Howard Baker, the Republican's leader in the Senate, former governor John Connally of Texas, a renegade Democrat.

One thing you have to say for the new intensity of campaigning in the primaries and the new urgency that television coverage has given them is that they produce, every other week, a sort of dramatic preview of the election. They dramatise, certainly, the relative appeal of the men in the running and so dishearten the losers early on instead of waiting for them to lose their illusions at the convention itself. After ten primaries, Mr Doe, Senator Baker and Governor Connally have quit. Mr Crane – with, I think, no delegates – hangs on, don't ask me why. Former President Ford has taken himself out.

It has come down to three men, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and John Anderson. Anderson is, for the moment, the most engaging figure. I don't mean personally engaging, though he is that, but engaging as a political phenomenon. He drew masses of independents in Massachusetts which he just lost. In Illinois he got 38 per cent of the popular vote to Reagan's 48 per cent. His strength came almost wholly from liberal Republicans, from Democrats disillusioned with Carter and from declared independents.

However, the Republican convention this summer will not be a convention of independents and disappointed Democrats and among regular Republicans, Anderson did very badly indeed. He may fire the young, the independents, the liberals everywhere but unless they run their own conventions, he has nowhere to go for a nomination.

So, against all my instincts and promises, I'd say that now it looks very much like Carter versus Reagan in November in spite of the stunning evidence of the Harris poll that Reagan would lose handsomely. But, as I say, there are 28 primaries and two conventions to go – 30 horse races and, as Mark Twain said, 'a difference of opinion is what makes horse races'.

There is time for opinions, even among 80 million voters, to differ and switch.

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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