Percent Of Vote Research Articles

The Long Decline of South Africa's ANC

ABSTRACT: Three decades after the African National Congress (ANC) won 62.7 percent of the vote that propelled Nelson Mandela into the presidency in 1994, the ANC's vote share plummeted to 40.2 percent of the national vote in South Africa's 2024 general election (down from 57.5 percent five years previously,= and well below the 50 percent predicted by preelection polls). Against thirty years of pessimistic academic literature predicting the opposite, the ANC accepted electoral defeat. But this left the ANC in a strategic quandary. Had it reached the upper 40 percent range, easy coalitions with small parties would have passed the 50 percent threshold. But with only 40 percent, the party reached back into the early years of democracy and formed a government of national unity—a multiparty coalition that left the ANC's most significant political opponents out in the cold. ANC (and national) president Cyril Ramaphosa has sidelined Africanist parties and created a coalition with decidedly centrist parties. The "broad church" which has bedeviled the ANC is at an end. Multiparty coalition government has arrived in South Africa, but questions remain: Can ANC electoral decline be arrested by this sharp move towards the center? And what, if any, substantive role is there for the ANC in the future if not?

The Scandalous Electoral Victory of the Governing Party United Russia

With unprecedented restrictions on voting rights and electoral manipulations, the governing party United Russia succeeded in gaining a comfortable majority in the Russian Duma elections despite growing dissatisfaction in the country. The secret winner of the election is the Communist Party, which unlike the other opposition parties increased its share of votes. During the parliamentary elections in Russia between 17 and 19 September 2021, the governing party United Russia officially won 324 of the 450 seats in the State Duma with 49.82 percent of votes. The results of the election again give the governing party a two-thirds majority, enabling it to amend the Constitution. However, its results are worse than in 2016, when United Russia received 54.2 percent of votes and 343 seats. At the same time, the approval rates for the party remained at a stable low of 27 to 28 percent during the entire electoral campaign according to the official sociological Russian Public Opinion Research Center.

Ethno-Regional Favoritism and the Political Economy of School Test Scores

The northern provinces of Burundi have suffered from an inferior education system since independence. This paper shows that the current, northern-led regime has chosen a drastic way to reverse that subordination. The national test (Concours National) at the end of primary school is at the heart of the matter. Using the universe of individual test score data which can be used to construct a school-level panel and applying differencein-differences analysis, the paper shows strong improvements in test scores in northern versus southern schools since the ruling party won an absolute majority in the 2010 elections. Immediately after these elections, schools situated in very poor, rural areas in the north scored as high as schools in non-poor areas of the capital. The paper finds that increased success rates, improved mean test scores and decreased standard deviations are explained by the percent of votes at the municipality level obtained by the ruling party in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Controlling for school budget and cohort size variables does not change the results. The latter are interpreted in the political economy of education reform in Burundi and considered as a case of ethno-regional favoritism in Africa.

ALMANYA İÇİN ALTERNATİF PARTİSİ'NİN GÖÇMEN KARŞITLIĞI

Almanya için Alternatif Partisi (AfD/Alternative für Deutschland), 2017 Almanya Federal Meclis seçimlerinde %12.6 oy oranıyla büyük bir başarı elde etmiştir. Parti, programında ve seçim kampanyalarında özellikle göçmen karşıtlığı, yabancı düşmanlığı ve İslam karşıtlığına vurgu yapmıştır. Angela Merkel hükümetlerinin mülteci politikasıyla ilgili sert eleştirileri, Avrupa’da güçlenen aşırı sağ popülizm ve Arap Baharı sonrası Avrupa’ya artan göçler partinin güçlenmesine neden olmuştur. AfD etkisiyle, diğer siyasi partiler de göçmenlerle ilgili söylemlerini sertleştirmişlerdir. Çalışma, AfD’nin göçmen karşıtlığını parti lider ve üyelerinin resmi söylemleri ve literatürden hareketle inceleyecektir. Partinin göçmen karşıtlığı, partinin kurulduğu 2013 yılından 2018’e kadar olan dönemde kronolojik olarak ele alınacaktır. Böylece, Avrupa’nın popülist/aşırı sağ partilerinin göç konusuna yaklaşımı ile ilgili literatüre katkı sağlamak amaçlanmıştır.

Guam

Guam Elizabeth (Isa) Ua Ceallaigh Bowman (bio), Michael Lujan Bevacqua (bio), and Tiara Na'Puti (bio) The year 2018–2019 in Guam began on a high note with a series of landmark elections and ended more forebodingly with a federal court case threatening the rights of the island's Indigenous people. November 2018 saw the victory of Democrat Lourdes "Lou" Leon Guerrero as the island's first female governor. For centuries, chief executives on island have been referred to as "maga'låhi," a colonial appropriation of the CHamoru term for a male leader. With Leon Guerrero's election, she assumed for the first time in modern history the title of "maga'håga," or female leader (pdn, 7 Nov 2018). Leon Guerrero led a local "blue wave" of Democrats who seized a super majority (ten out of fifteen) seats in I Liheslaturan Guåhan (Guam Legislature). Among those elected was former journalist Clynt Ridgell, the first Guam-elected leader of Chuukese descent (pdn, 7 Jan 2019). Leon Guerrero's lieutenant governor, Joshua Tenorio, became the first openly gay man in US history to hold that position. In I Liheslaturan Guåhan, ten of the officials elected were women, including seven Democrats and three [End Page 195] Republicans. With 67 percent of its legislature made up of women, Guam held one of the highest percentages of female elected leadership in world history. This milestone reflected the wave of women winning public office in the continental United States, but it could also be tied to a resurgence of CHamoru values long suppressed by patriarchal colonialism (pdn, 8 Nov, 2018). As a way of combining these two narratives, a company called Maga'håga Rising began to sell "The Future is Famalao'an" t-shirts shortly after Leon Guerrero's inauguration. "Famalao'an" is the CHamoru term for women, playing on the popular American hashtag #thefutureisfemale (pdn, 13 Jan 2019). At the same time, the maga'håga appointed Tony Babauta as her chief of staff and Jack Hattig as director of the Chamorro Land Trust Commission. This was despite past scandals involving sexual misconduct toward women—Babauta at the federal level and Hattig at a high school (pdn, 10 Dec 2019; gdp, 19 Jan 2019). Leon Guerrero survived a divisive four-way primary to become the Democratic Party's nominee. Leon Guerrero and Tenorio beat their closest primary opponents, former Senator Frank Aguon and former Attorney General of Guam Alicia Limtiaco, by under 300 votes (8,218 to 7,958). Aguon and Limtiaco, despite signing a party unity pledge during the campaign, mounted a write-in campaign during the general election. Their effort was boosted through significant self-inflicted wounds by the Republican nominee for governor Ray Tenorio, then lieutenant governor. In the midst of the campaign, Tenorio was charged and tried for official misconduct for taking a police officer's gun. While Tenorio was found not guilty after the election, the scandal tarnished his campaign (pdn, 22 March 2019). With Leon Guerrero the heavy favorite, much attention was focused on whether or not her camp would be able to garner enough votes to avoid a runoff election. According to Guam law, a candidate must receive a majority of the votes in order to be elected, or else a runoff is held. Aguon and Limtiaco's write-in campaign won an unprecedented 22.9 percent of the general election votes, just 1,258 fewer than Ray Tenorio and his running mate, former Senator Tony Ada (26.4 percent). Leon Guerrero narrowly avoided a runoff by winning 50.7 percent of the votes. Maga'håga Leon Guerrero, a former nurse, was a pro-choice community activist in Guam in the early 1990s. Guam remains a heavily Catholic island, although recent child sexual abuse scandals have weakened the influence of the church. Though not damaging her campaign, her support for reproductive rights as maga'håga created a minicontroversy. After the election, Leon Guerrero's Bureau of Women's Affairs began actively seeking an abortion provider for Guam, as there had been no official provider for nearly a year. The bureau director stated that a recent case in which a twelve-year...

Hungarian right-wing populism: nothing is what it seems

12 | International Union Rights | 27/1-27/2 FOCUS | RIGHT-WING POPULISM, TRADE UNIONS, AND FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHTS Hungarian right-wing populism: nothing is what it seems Since the rise of Donald Trump and the European far-right anti-foreigner, xenophobic movements, the question has been repeatedly asked in Hungary and abroad: what can the traditional institutions of the left do to counter the far right, What should the trade unions do against a tendency also spreading among workers? The far-right Party of Truth and Life (MIÉP) was already in the parliament (5,5 percent of votes in 1998), was followed by the emergence of extreme-right party Jobbik at the beginning of this millennium. At its foundation, the party described itself as ‘a principled, conservative and radically patriotic Christian party’, whose ‘fundamental purpose’ is the protection of ‘Hungarian values and interests’. It marked a significant move and brought a growing player to the surface, but without parliamentary representation. In 2007 the Hungarian Guard was established with the aim of standing for the physical, spiritual and intellectual selfdefence of Hungarians, in fact for filling the place of the ‘beaten army’ and for taking action against criminals who terrorise Hungarians, disbanded by court ruling in January 2009. An overview published on Wikipedia states that ‘[s]ince 2014 Jobbik has started to re-define itself as a conservative people’s party and changed the controversial elements of its communication. According to the party’s Manifesto on the guidelines of a future government, Jobbik represents all Hungarian citizens and people and aims to build a modern national identity, while rejecting the chauvinism of the 20th century. After the Hungarian parliamentary elections on 8 April 2018, the party polled 1,092,806 votes, securing 19.06 percent of the total, making them Hungary’s second largest party in the National Assembly’. Since the existence of Jobbik, it has been quarantined by the left and liberal parties, while contested by the party of Viktor Orbán, Fidesz. In the fight for power, for right and conservative voters over the past years we have observed a continuous shift of Jobbik to the centre, while Fidesz moved to win over far-right voters. As a consequence in 2018 Jobbik split – the Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom) was founded by former Jobbik Vice-President and other ‘dissidents’ claiming that the party’s leadership moved away from its radical roots. Today, with the third consecutive Fidesz government since 2010, the declared far-right party Jobbik is understood as a political formation leaning to the right-centre according to its ‘popular party’ strategy, while Fidesz is seen as increasingly moving to the right. Since the announcement of the slogan ‘one camp, one flag’, the strategy of Fidesz has been not to leave uncontrolled space for other right-wing actors. The strategy of the ‘central force’ announced in 2010 was complemented by their statement that Fidesz needed the presence of a far-right party (formerly Jobbik, now the Our Homeland) to ensure its own position and image. However, its desire for control has not changed. Fidesz is an active player in the far-right scene and discourse: they take over the themes, messages catchwords and symbols of the far right, and are involved in shaping the processes. There are two extreme emotions triggering cohesion of extreme-right supporters: fear and hope. What are the reasons, key tools for holding the voting base of right-wing populism together and used with great success – by the Hungarian prime minister? ‘Nationalism’: like the right-wing populist political groups all around in Europe, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán refers to the loss of ‘national sovereignty, autonomy’, stressing that democracy is overridden by international powers (Brussels, IMF, multinationals, big banks) by unelected and powerful supranational bodies. In the enemy image, the ‘internal enemy’ is the left and liberals, financed by ‘Soros’ serving these forces. With this, a sense of fear is created, whereby the hope is provided by the governing forces. The ‘national government’ promise to reinforce the nation state restore popular sovereignty, protect democracy, and the charismatic leader at the forefront telling the only truth, is the only one...

Partai Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) dan Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) sebagai Partai Islam Pendukung Demokrasi PKS Pada Pemilu

<p>The article compares the achievement of Partai Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) and Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) in the latest general election held in 2013 in Malaysia and in 2014 in Indonesia. The writer finds that the political performance of PAS and PKS has indicated differently contrast results. While political electability of PAS in the 2013 Malaysia’s general election has disappointed this party, PKS has successfully proved that surveys held by a number of survey institutes—predicting that the party would cease within the 2014 Indonesia’s national election—were totally false. Many political figures of PAS have failed to gain positions in the legislative assembly. Meanwhile, in viewing PKS’s political performance during the 2014 national election, one may assume that this party was luckily survive. This is because, a number of surveys conducted before the election had predicted that PKS could be considered lucky when it was able to gain five percent of vote, as its former president has been suspected of being corrupt for his involvement in cows import. However, the fact shows that PKS has not only magnificently survived but it was even able to gain almost seven percent of voters’ vote. Unfortunately, PKS was unsuccessful to achieve its political target to be the biggest three of national vote.</p>

DEFEAT THAT WAS TREATED FOR VICTORY: REASONS BEHIND THE GOOD PERFORMANCE OF A. KUBILIUS’ GOVERNMENT PARTIES IN SEIMAS ELECTIONS

Scientific and non-scientific forecasts of 2012 Seimas elections were very unfavourable for the XV Lithuanian government head by Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius. Loss against all three opposition parties was predicted for the HU-LCD, dominant party of government. Both its junior partners, liberal parties LiCS and LRLM were expected not to exceed the legal threshold (5 percent of votes). However, despite the adverse circumstances governing coalition managed to perform very well in 2012 Seimas elections: according to the joint received vote share (25.71) it was the most successful government since the restoration of Lithuania’s independence. HU-LCD finished in second place according to parliamentary mandates, and LRLM even managed to improve its vote share if compared to the previous elections. This article aims to explain this defeat that for some politicians and observers appeared as victory: why the government of A. Kubilius performed so well (relatively, in the Lithuanian context) in Seimas elections?Two main theories are employed in the article. Party identification is theory centred about idea that voting behaviour is determined by stable psychological-emotional attachment to some party (party family) that is formed in the early socialization. In the Lithuanian context this theory is usually modified: majority of party identification traced to the excommunist-anticommunist cleavage (particularly prominent in early independence years, 1990–1992) and less rigid term “party attachment” is used. Existing research on subject reveals that HU-LCD has a stable core of voters, therefore it is expected for them to account for the most part of 2012 success. In the case of LRLM, since the party is very young (established in 2006), party attachment is supposed to work only if the rationalistic approach to party identification is also employed: that LRLM in the short life-span developed a reliable image and mobilized voters with liberal leaning attachment. According to these theoretical considerations, hypothesis is raised that electoral success of A. Kubilius’ government was mainly determined by party attachment factor.On other hand, party identification theory is not alone sufficient if loss of faithful voters and entrance of those without party attachment is considered. It is showed that despite overall unpopularity, A. Kubilius’ government enjoyed more positive evaluations than the XIV Lithuanian government of Gediminas Kirkilas. Moreover, economic situation in Lithuania improved the year before election. Therefore, economic voting theory is also employed: it asserts that voters make their decision on accounts of retrospective (prospective) evaluations of their own (egotropic voting) or country’s (sociotropic voting). It must be emphasized that this theory is completely compatible with the party identification theory, because it is able to explain shortterm losses and gains. Second hypothesis is raised that is treated as complementary to the first one: it asserts that the parties in A. Kubilius’ government attracted new voters according to the logic of retrospective economic voting.Individual level data from the 2012 post-electoral survey is employed for the quantitative analysis (crosstabs, correlations and binary logistic regression), presented in second and third section of article. Empirical data provides support for both hypotheses: though there is a certain effect of party attachment, alone it could not determine such a good performance of government parties. The article concludes that party identification was necessary, though not sufficient condition of good government performance in the 2012 Seimas elections: part of the faithful voters was lost, but these losses were compensated by new voters that positively (and retrospectively) evaluated the economy of Lithuania. Analysis reveals four main types of government voters: 1) Positive identifier (51.24 percent of government electorate); 2) Sceptic identifier (17.91); 3) Rational independent (16.42); 4) Others (14.43).

The Political Consequences of the Financial and Economic Crisis in Europe: Electoral Punishment and Popular Protest

The Political Consequences of the Financial and Economic Crisis in Europe: Electoral Punishment and Popular Protest

Magic Spell of List PR? UK 2010 General Election Result Under Latvian Rules

Tories hold 47.0 percent seats in the parliament, but harbor only 36.0 percent of votes. In a democracy with PR list election system like Latvia both facts leave open doors either for Tory-lead coalition or minority government. Liberal democrats claim they would gain more in case of PR list selection system were introduced in Great Britain. Does this argument hold water if Latvian variation of list PR election system is applied to the specific case or is this just wishful thinking?

Good News for Bush? Economic News, Personal Finances, and the 2004 Presidential Election

The forecasting model presented here is a revised version of a model developed prior to the 1996 election (Holbrook 1996) and is essentially a referendum model. The original model regressed the incumbent party percent of the two-party vote on presidential popularity, an aggregate measure of satisfaction with personal finances, and a dummy variable coded “1” for years in which the incumbent party had held the White House for at least two consecutive terms and “0” for all other years. The first two variables are intended to capture the political and economic performance of the incumbent administration, while the latter variable (borrowed from Abramowitz 1988) is based on the idea that it may be easier to convince voters that it is “time for a change” if the incumbent party has held the White House for at least two consecutive terms. This model provided a fairly accurate forecast of the 1996 election and also had close out-of-sample post-dictions of elections from 1952–1992. However, the 2000 election represented a significant bump in the road, and the model over-predicted Gore's percent of the vote by approximately 10 percentage points.

The Japanese Communist Party: Organization and Resilience in the Midst of Adversity

A RGUABLY, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) is the largest nonruling Communist party in the advanced industrial democracies in terms of party and front organizational membership, party newspaper readership and electoral support.' With the exit of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from communism, the JCP became the largest nonruling Communist party by default rather than by a marked increase in its mass popularity. (See appendix 1). Unlike the PCI, which had transformed itself into a social democratic party, the JCP has retained its Marxist ideology and the organizational principle of democratic centralism. Notwithstanding the collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR and an overall crisis of communism, the JCP had succeeded in minimizing its electoral decline and had even staged a modest electoral recovery in the July 1995 Upper House Elections.2 In that election, theJCP captured 9.5 percent of the votes cast in the party proportional list in contrast to 7.9 percent three years earlier. In the April 1995 local elections, the JCP obtained 6.6 percent of the votes in the prefectural assemblies and 12.0 percent of the votes cast in the special-designated cities. Four years earlier, it won only 6.3 percent of the prefectural votes and 11.8 percent from the special-designated cities.3

News Coverage, Endorsements and Personal Campaigning: The Influence of Non-Paid Activities in Congressional Elections

This study examines the influence of traditional, nonpaid campaign activities—news coverage, endorsements and personal campaigning—on election outcome by polling congressional winners and losers. Results argue that non-paid activities affect both outcome and percent of votes received. For incumbents, appearances before small groups enhanced vote percentages. For non-incumbents, external endorsements and editorial support from print and broadcast media were positively related to voter response. Evidence indicates that incumbents and challengers use different strategies … and that challengers have something to learn from incumbents.

The Ups and Downs of Elections, or Look Before You Swing

Why not use swing as a measure of electoral change in the United States? ask David Butler and Stephen D. Van Beek in PS (1990). This article shows why one should look before one swings, for the conditions of meaningful use are so limiting that swing is unsuited for the great majority of countries, including many elections in the United States and Britain. Instead of swing, it is better to employ a more precise and more robust measure of the ups and downs of parties.DefinitionSwing is the average of the change in the share of the vote won by two parties contesting an election. If party A gains 5 percent of the vote between election x and election y, and party B loses 5 percent, then there is a swing of 5 percentage points from B to A. By definition, swing is a measure of movement between two, and only two parties. In an attempt to control for the effect of other parties, the two-party measure of swing treats the votes for parties A and B as equal to 100 percent of the total vote, whatever the share of the vote taken by one or more “third” parties.

Politics of Resentment: Right-Wing Radicalism in West Germany

During the past several years, a number of West European countries have expenenced a serious challenge from right-wing populist parties. The French National Front, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Swiss Vigilants, Action National, and the Autopartei, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), and the various progressive parties in Scandinavia are among the most prominent examples of a rising tide of often radical right-wing populism which has raised concern among politicians and political commentators alike.' Referring to themselves as national-conservative or right-conservative parties they pursue a range of similar objectives: a tightening of strict law and order to combat rising crime rates associated with drugs; a return to traditional moral values in the face of a growing number of abortions and the AIDS threat; and, most important of all, the protection of national and cultural identity allegedly threatened by third world immigrants, foreign workers, and refugees. The latest addition to the list of right-wing parties has been the West German Republikaner. Founded in 1983 by Franz Sch6nhuber and disgruntled former members of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the Republikaner became the focus of attention in the wake of the 1989 elections in West Berlin, where they came literally out of nowhere to gain more than 90,000 votes (7.5 percent of the vote) and eleven seats in the city parliament. Despite attempts by political observers to play down the extent of support for the radical right, the Republikaner repeated their earlier local success on the federal level in the European elections in June 1989: capturing 7.1 percent of the popular vote, they were the main cause for the painful losses of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and particularly their Bavarian sister party, the CSU. In addition, the German People's Party (DVU), an extremist neo-Nazi party, received 1.6 percent of the vote, increasing the total vote for the far right to 9 percent. Successes in subsequent local elections in North Rhine-Westphalia and Baden-Wiirttemberg in the fall and a respectable 3.3 percent in the state elections in the Saarland in the spring of 1990 against a highly popular minister president, Oskar Lafontaine (Social Democratic Party, SPD), who embarked on a populist course of his own, were indications that the Republikaner might stand a chance to overcome the five percent hurdle in the federal elections at the end of the year. The fact that a right-wing party could rise almost over night to command national and international attention points to serious deficits in West German democracy. After the establishment of the left-libertarian Greens in the early 1980s the gains of radical parties on both sides of the political spectrum largely at the expense of the established catch-all parties expose above all the declining ability of the large parties to bind their respective electorates. As in other West European countries, the number of floating voters has increased considerably during the last decade, from 24 percent in 1980 to more than a third in 1989.2

A comment on the economics of campaign funds

In a recent article in this journal William P. Welch (2.) applied basic economic concepts to the development of a theory of campaign funds. Included in the article was an empirical test of the hypothesis that campaign contributions can be transformed into expected vote percentage through a production function. The foremost objective of this comment is to re-estimate the Welch election production function in a more theoretically appropriate functional form. A distinctive characteristic of an election is that one candidate's actions influence the other candidate's outcome; that is, the output (expected vote percentage) represents a "zero sum game." An election does not depend on the absolute level of each candidate's inputs but upon the relative level of each candidate's inputs vis-a-vis the other. The value of the output will not be affected at all by equal proportion variations in the inputs. A function which describes the election of two candidates must be homogeneous of degree zero. The election production function estimated by Welch does not satisfy the above condition. Furthermore, the Welch approach with insertion of the input values for each candidate into the estimated model will result in predictions of their percent of votes which do not sum to one with probability one. A reformulation of the Cobb-Douglas production function to account for the relative nature of the inputs has been developed by Lott and Warner (1.):

The Future of Rightist Extremism in West Germany

The rapid growth of the National Democratic Party (NPD) since its establishment in 1964 and its entry into the Landtag of Hesse, Bavaria, Schleswig-Holstein, Rhineland-Palatinate, Lower Saxony, Bremen, and Baden-Wuerttemberg had been a source of embarrassment to the West German government until the recent Bundestag election. Both domestically and internationally, the NPD had been branded as neo-Nazi; its appearance and successes had been compared to the NSDAP during the Weimar Republic; and questions had been raised as to whether the German government and voters had the will, the means, and the judgment to contain it. Consequently, the first reaction to the NPD's failure to obtain the necessary five percent of the vote in the 1969 election was one of relief, since it indicated that German voters were capablethrough open political competition-of denying seats in the national legislature to an extremist party of the Right. In spite of this outcome, on analysis the electoral results were somewhat unclear. On the one hand, they showed that the NPD's share of the national vote had doubled since the Bundestag election of 1965.1 In 1965, only one year after its establishment, the party received 2.1 percent (664,193) of the second votes cast as opposed to 4.3 percent (1,422,106) in September 1969 (Table 1). In every Land there was a net increase in the number of votes cast for the NPD between the 1965 and 1969 elections. In addition, the NPD increased its share of first votes in every electoral district, doubling or tripling its share in the majority of districts (Table 2). Although the party received no direct or indirect mandates in 1965 and 1969, in the latter year it crossed the five percent barrier in Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate, Bavaria (where it received the highest number of second votes), and the Saar (where its votes rose from 1.8 percent to 5.7 percent).

The 1968 Election in the West

TONG BEFORE the voters went to the polls, observers generally conceded that most of the thirteen states which compose the West would go for NixonAgnew. Westerners ran true to form. Humphrey-Muskie were only able to capture 13 (Washington and Hawaii) of the area's 95 electoral votes. In the popular vote contest Nixon-Agnew won easily over Humphrey-Muskie, 48.8 percent to 43.6 percent, while Wallace received only 6.9 percent (see Table 1). The extent of the Nixon-Agnew victory in the West was clearly more impressive than it was in the U.S. as a whole. Nationwide the Republican candidates received 43.4, Democrats 42.7, and Wallace 13.5 percent of the vote. While NixonAgnew won the national popular poll by less than 1 percent, they captured the thirteen Western states by more than 5 percent. By way of contrast, in 1960, Nixon received 51.1 percent and President John Kennedy captured 48.5 percent of the popular vote in the West. Thus, in 1968 Nixon doubled his popular vote margin over 1960 from 2.6 to 5.2 percent. It is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate precisely the effect of the Wallace vote on Nixon's margin. However, it is safe to conclude, as some of the individual

The 1968 Election in California

ROBABLY the major highlight of the 1968 elections in California occurred in the primary and not in the final election. Max Rafferty, the outspoken educator, a conservative and cantankerous Republican in politics, simply was not expected to defeat the incumbent Republican United States Senator, Thomas Kuchel, whose liberal Republicanism appeared to be more in line with the current political thought than it had been in his previously successful elections. Several Democratic political leaders who did not think Kuchel could be defeated but who did not have the same high regard for Rafferty regretted that they had not been bold enough to make a bid for the nomination against an opponent, Alan Cranston, whom they thought vulnerable and unable to muster sufficient organizational and financial strength to wage a successful campaign. Rafferty defeated his primary opponent by a vote of 1,112,947 to 1,043,315 or by 51.7 percent of the total vote for this office. In the general election, however, he received only 47.6 percent of the vote cast for the two nominees. This result might have been somewhat unexpected, since this was generally a Republican election year in California. On the other hand, this state with its closed primary had approximately a 4 to 3 Democratic registration. Its conservative Democrats may be equated with the liberal or progressive Republicans, and if these Republicans had voted for the man on their ticket regardless of ideology, then the Republican nominee in this race would have won. This would especially be true with a strong liberal on the Democratic ticket. Many Republicans must have disliked Rafferty, especially in educational circles, while at the same time overlooking Cranston's solid liberalism, to have brought Cranston's victory in this race. Nixon's win in California, where the electorate votes for a slate of 40 presidential electors, also was very close, 3,467,664 to 3,244,318, or 51.7 percent of the two-party vote. This figure fell to 47.8 percent of the total vote. Two other slates of delegates were on the ballot, those of the American Independent party and the Peace and Freedom party. These received a total of 514,977, with 487,270 cast for the American Independent party. George Wallace's party received 6.7 percent of the total vote cast in the election for presidential electors and for write-in candidates.