Associated Press, by Walter Mears
Winning Work
Concord, N.H. (AP) - President Ford's hairbreadth victory over Ronald Reagan in New Hampshire's keynote Republican primary points to a long struggle for the Republican presidential nomination. It signals that a quick knockout blow will be hard to land in the procession of elections to come.
Ford is a winner, and that helps. But the New Hampshire verdict also shows that, when they get to the voting booth, republicans are closely divided between the man who is president and the man who wants to be.
Georgia Jimmy Carter was the big winner of the first of the presidential primaries, searing a comfortable victory that makes him the frontrunner among Democratic candidates. There are nine all told.
Carter's new mantle is one that could have drawbacks. But it is a giant step forward for the former governor who came to New Hampshire as a nobody more than a year ago and left with first prize.
"I remember when we couldn't find a microphone," said Carter.
He'll find plenty now, for it is both the blessing and the curse of the front-running candidate that he faces intense scrutiny every step of the campaign way.
While the ballots counted after an all-night Republican tally awarded Ford his victory, the political caravan breaks camp and moves southward, the Democrats to do battle in Massachusetts next Tuesday, Ford and Reagan to meet again in Florida on March 9.
The New Hampshire vote was a preface, forever checked within days by the decisions of other voters, in bigger states. Reagan had it up phrase for it: "One primary does not a summer make."
It will take 51 to do that, in almost weekly competition not loading until June 8.
Reagan and his managers I've tried hard to convince political opinion makers that running reasonably close to Ford was all that should be expected of them. But offstage, Reagan men clearly thought they had the lead and might win outright.
"I feel whatever happened tonight is a victory," Reagan said after midnight, with the Republican verdict still in doubt.
"Hogwash," countered Rep. James Cleveland, the Ford campaign chairman. "A victory is a victory, particularly for an incumbent who is making tough decisions ... against a guy who can come out of the West and make promises every day of the week."
There was another phase in the primary, and Ford was winning that decisively. With the vote count nearing completion, delegates backing him for the nomination led for 19 of the 81 seats New Hampshire will have at the Republican National Convention.
Howard H. Callaway, Ford's national campaign manager, said Reagan had been beaten in his strongest northern state. Reagan said he had done better than anyone should have expected.
They can argue about that forever - or at least until the next primary. The fact is that Ford won, in a state where Reagan enjoyed the ardent support of the dominant newspaper, the Manchester Union-Leader, the backing of Gov. Meldrim Thomson and a superior campaign organization.
Reagan was campaigning today in Illinois, which holds it's primary March 16, but by nighttime, he is due in Tampa, Fla. And the New Hampshire loss may well lead him to intensify his personal campaign in Florida.
"They told us that any kind of victory would help the president in Florida," a Ford campaign strategist said. "Well, we've given them any kind of a victory."
The Reagan ploy has been to try to hold Ford to the standard expected of elected presidents. That's what did in Lyndon B. Johnson eight years ago, when he won the New Hampshire primary but was rated a loser because he only had a seven-point margin.
But Ford is not an elected president. He holds office by appointment and succession. The New Hampshire primary was his first electoral test outside the Grand Rapids, Mich. congressional district that 13 times elected him to the House.
And Reagan, naturally, has been on both sides of the argument, saying on one hand that he shouldn't be expected to beat an incumbent, and on the other he has the background to prove he can win elections.
"I don't see how anyone could be a right-wing extremist and win two elections by landslide margins in California, where is more than three to two Democrats in registration," he said after Ford described him as too far to the right to win the White House.
He said his showing in the primary "indicates that a great percentage of the people in our party do not ... feel that way."
For what it's worth, there also is a bit of history on Ford side now. There have been six previous presidential preference primaries here and, in that time, no candidate who did not win in New Hampshire has made it to the White House.
Across the ballot, [Rep. Mo] Udall, the second-place Democratic finisher, was sounding a victory-in-defeat theme not unlike Reagan's. He said he had emerged "as the leader of the progressive center candidates in New Hampshire," by which he means everybody except Carter.
But Carter said his New Hampshire victory was not a matter of ideology. He said that might be the case later, in Massachusetts or Florida. He also said that in a two-man race, he thinks he could beat Gov. George C. Wallace easily.
And he added that he had proven that being from the South wasn't the campaign handicap some people thought it would be.
Despite New Hampshire's sendoff, Florida, Republicans are conservative by habit, remains a difficult test for President Ford. It will campaign there Saturday and Sunday. Next Tuesday, ford will win the Vermont primary unopposed and should have no samer problem in carrying Massachusetts, where Reagan has not mounted a campaign effort although his name is automatically listed on the ballot.
For Carter and the Democrats, Mssachusetts is the next big test. Wallace is running there, riding Boston's bitter school busing controversy. So is Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington, who has been sharply critical of Carter.
As Udall told it, a good many Democrats had agreed to help Carter, particularly in Southern states, to heed off Wallace. But Carter isn't just a stopper now, he's a leader.
[Indiana Sen. Birch] Bayh claimed his third-place finish in New Hampshire was gratifying. [Former Oklahoma Sen. Fred] Harris said he had hoped to do better and thinks he will in Massachusetts. [Former Amb. Sargent] Shriver said much the same thing.
And Harris had a word of explanation for his No. 4 ranking:
"Our problem is that the little people were not able to reach the vote levers."
Philadelphia (AP) - Jimmy Carter has virtually wiped out his active opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, and now he is ready to confront Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey if it comes to that.
It may not, if Carter can keep rolling at the rate he managed in Pennsylvania's presidential primary election. He won Tuesday's popular vote with 87 per cent of the vote and a landslide margin over Sen. Henry M. Jackson of Washington.
And he held a surprising lead today as the ballots were counted in the separate election of national convention delegates.
Carter beat the field, and he also beat the union leaders and organization Democrats who had tried to stop him for Humphrey's sake. It was his seventh primary victory in nine tries, and may have been his most important because it came against the odds and the organizations. Furthermore, it gave him new momentum to carry into a hectic six weeks in which 22 states will hold their primary elections.
Carter is running again Saturday in the Texas primary, and he hopes that the Pennsylvania outcome will bolster his cause there. He is entered in four states next Tuesday.
This is not to say that Carter has the nomination won; he acknowledges there is a long way to go, and he said in advance that a Pennsylvania win would not make him unstoppable.
But everybody who has tested him so far has lost, and if the former Georgia governor is going to be stopped now, it apparently will have to be done by challengers who have not yet been in the arena.
Jackson can't do it. He had everything going for him in Pennsylvania, but he ran a distant second. He chose the state for a major test against Carter, and got beat on his own territory.
Rep. Morris K. Udall of Arizona ran third. Udall's campaign is heavily in debt, and he is still looking for his first victory against major competitors.
Nonetheless, Udall, like Jackson, said he means to keep running and will campaign all the way to the convention.
New York (AP) - It was an affair without passion, a marriage without romance, and the Democratic National Convention was performed with all the precision of a pre-arranged royal wedding.
But after their flings, their spats, that divorces of the past decade, Democrats were ready for Jimmy Carter, the outsider who barged into the party and became the bridegroom.
After eight years out of the White House, they yearn for a winner.
So did the four days of New York, a national convention Carter praised for its show of decorum and order, without any fights or free-for-alls.
"Among Democrats, that can only happen once every 200 years," the former Georgia governor said.
It happened because Carter made it happen, by winning the Democratic presidential nomination so convincingly and so early that the convention could only ratify, not decide.
Seldom if ever has a man gained that political pinnacle with as few debts to the establishment, the party power structure.
Even before his triumphant entry into Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, Carter said he'd had enough conventioneering. "I'm ready to get out of the hotel suites and the conventions and get back to the people," he said.
Your Richard J Daleys and Hubert H. Humphreys and Carl Alberts go to the people, too. But they savor the political theater of convention time. In New York, however, the play ended with their bidding farewell to the party power that they have wielded at conventions past.
Command has passed, to an unfamiliar leader and a new generation.
And that passage was dramatized when Humphrey, his own last hope for the White House long since vanished, studded the platform to hail the vice-presidential nomination of a man who could be his son, and is his protege.
For Sen. Walter F. Mondale, 48, undertook his earliest political ventures 28 years ago, as a volunteer, in Humphrey's first Senate campaign.
Humphrey said the team of Carter and Mondale represent a turning point in American politics, and so they do.
"This ticket ... represents the final reunification of North and South," Humphrey said.
"We are a new generation of leadership," cried Mondale, a mundane orator but suddenly, in his new role, speaking with fiery vigor. "We are strong, we are experienced, and we are ready."
Theirs is a young ticket, Carter is 51, three years older than his running mate.
If they win, and are re-elected, the Democrats' course could be set for nearly a generation.
As a 56-year-old vice president, Mondale would, in 1984, be a powerful prospect for the White House.
And that would hold even if Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts wanted the nomination. He would be 52.
Kennedy, heir to the family political legacy, long has been considered a man who could have national nomination for the asking or the accepting.
He never asked, and now he may not be asked. If he wants a future nomination, he may well have to campaign for it, like a Democrat of any other name.
Carter not only defeated the political establishment, he took it over and changed its address. "We're going to run the campaign from Atlanta," said Hamilton Jordan, 32, his campaign manager. "Chairman [Robert S.] Strauss is going to run the party from Washington."
It wasn't said, but it was clear: The party will be run as Atlanta wants it run.
There is other evidence of the turning point the Democrats had passed.
There was Sen. Edmund S. Muskie surrendering his hopes for national office and going home to Maine to campaign for another term. Carter had considered him for vice-presidential nomination - it would have been Muskie's second - and 62-year-old senator clearly wanted it.
"Well, I almost lost control," he said, after Mondale got it.
"Now I'm re-establishing it and I'm beginning to feel comfortable again ... I think this is the end of national politics, in the sense of being a national ticket, for me."
There was the hard-to-hear speech of Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, crippled in one campaign, stripped of his Southern power base in another, and, by his own account, done with presidential politicking.
For old-time's sake, he said, as from countless platforms before, that Americans would be better off if those bureaucrats in Washington had their briefcases thrown into the Potomac.
And the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. boomed a final benediction over at audience then included George C. Wallace.
It was a convention of unity, but it was not one of drama or high emotion or spontaneous cheers. Gone were the staged demonstrations of yesteryear, when Democrats marched the floor behind brass bands to cheer the men who would be nominees.
For one thing, there wasn't room on the floor of Madison Square Garden. The aisles weren't wide enough. And for another, the convention was staged so as to avoid wasting precious, free national television time on such displays. The rules gave a candidate 15 minutes for his nominating speeches. The major events came, as planned, during prime time, or at least before midnight.
But it was more than rules and planning, it was mood. It was as though the delegates had become New Yorkers, as blase as their hosts.
They went about their business, chose their nominee, applauded their heroes and heroines, waved the Carter-Mondale signs, but when the band stopped playing and the gavel rapped, the cheering soon stopped.
For Carter's entry on Thursday night, it lasted six minutes, then quieted so the nominee could pledge to lead them onto a restoration of faith, and trust, and honesty, toward great national deeds.
His 38-minute address what's punctuated with applause and cheers. But these were not the wildly cheering, hard-to-silence Democrats of past conventions. Here, the man with the gavel was in control.
Had there been an applause meter for spontaneous ovations, it probably would have given the highest rating to Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas, the black congresswoman who said in her keynote speech that her presence there was evidence that the American Dream of equality can now be fulfilled.
Carter's convention was as controlled and carefully mapped as was the campaign that brought him from the lonely lot of a one-term governor was no power base to the highest prize his party can award.
Now his task is to stir in the campaign the fervor and intensity that seems lacking at the convention. He has done it before, to win the 19 presidential primary elections that sealed his nomination. He is a tough, adroit campaigner, an engineer who plans every move.
At the moment, he has a head start. The latest Gallup poll, completed on June 28, rates from the leader over President Ford, 53 per cent to 36 per cent, and over Ronald Reagan, 64 per cent to 28 per cent.
The gap may become even wider now that Carter has been nominated. For the Republicans won't make their choice until Aug 18. When it is one Democrat versus one Republican, the ratings are almost certain to become closer.
Cartrr knows that, and he warns at every opportunity against overconfidence among Democrats.
For Carter, there is a long path to be traveled. But it is a measure of how incredibly far he has come that the candidate, once ranked among the least likely to succeed, now is counseling the Democrats against overconfidence.
"My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president," he used to say to incredulous voters, and more than a few walked away shaking their heads and smiling skeptical smiles.
"My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president," he told the 37th Democratic National Convention, and they cheered their commander.
Kansas City, Mo. (AP) - Gerald R. Ford, a plainspoken man who gained the White House in extraordinary times, won the Republican presidential nomination early Tuesday in the tumult of a divided national convention.
Then, two hours after midnight, he stood at the side of his vanquished challenger, and told Ronald Reagan: "I congratulate you on a fine campaign ..."
By a 119-vote margin, Ford defeated at last the fierce, conservative challenge waged by Reagan, the unrelenting rival whose candidacy kept the prize in doubt until the eve of the Republican decision.
They parted with a warm handshake, after vowing unity and professing mutual admiration in a brief, nationally-televised news conference.
The Republican National Convention's first ballot gave Ford 1,187 votes, 57 more than the majority he needed. Reagan received 1,070, Secretary of Commerce Elliott Richardson one, and one delegate abstained.
While some Reagan delegates wept in the bitterness of their defeat, Ford rejoiced briefly with his staff, the left his hotel for a 25-block trip that symbolize the urgency of his quest for unity. For presidents customarily are called upon, and this time, Ford was the caller.
He conferred with Reagan in the challenger's suite at the Alameda Plaza Hotel. Ford said they discussed the vice presidential selection the president would announce about 19 hours later.
Ford declined to say whether he had invited Reagan to join his ticket, as some Republicans had urged. He said that it was a private matter.
Reagan seemed for a moment to have opened the way to the possibility of a move to draft him for the vice presidential nomination, a role he has repeatedly said he would not accept. Asked whether he could refuse to accept a convention draft, he replied, "I'll answer that if and when it comes." He said there were no such signs of such a thing happening.
But then he said he would not permit his name to be presented for vice presidential nomination.
Ford said he had not made up his mind on a running mate.
He would not further discuss the selection, although campaign and White House sources I've said the field is down to four names - three, if Reagan's insistence against second place stands.
Ford didn't make be early boarding trick to talk about that anyhow, he made it in his quest for unity in a party driven by a long, sometimes angry campaign.
"My congratulations to you," Reagan said. "It was a good fight, Mom, and he won. You know that we both agreed from the very beginning but once the fight was over we're on the same side, and we both go forward together."
Ford said there would be a place for Reagan, "a person whose philosophy is virtually identical to mine," in his administration. But Reagan said he'd rather return to his role as a conservative commentator then take a job in Washington.
And so Ford, president-by-appointment, won the right to seek for the first time the people's mandate to continue an administration they never elected.
It was the vote of West Virginia that cemented Ford's nomination, nearly an hour into the ballot that began shortly before midnight. This funny votes the president one they're pushed his count past the 1,170-delegate majority and set the sweltering convention cheering.
"Let's beat Carter," the Republicans chanted, waiving Ford signs, while beaten Reagan partisans looked on.
As he won one campaign, Ford embarked on another, to heal the rupture in a party divided during his long struggle to defeat Reagan.
Even in his moment of victory there were symptoms of that division. While Rep. John J. Rhodes of Arizona, the chairman, major traditional motion for unanimous nomination, a subdued chorus of no votes followed the roar of ayes.
"In the opinion of the chair, the ayes have it, and the nomination is made unanimous," Rhodes said.
In a personal gesture of unity, Ford left his hotel headquarters shortly after his victory to call upon his defeated rival.
The president has spent Wednesday working to heal Republican wounds, flattering the factions by asking advice on a running mate. He kept his vice presidential thinking to himself.
Campaign and White House sources said the field of prospects had narrowed to four, Sen. Howard F. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon, former Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, and Reagan himself.
Reagan said repeatedly that he would never accept second place, but there was widespread sentiment among conservative delegates for a Ford-Reagan ticket.
With unity, Ford had said earlier in the day, he could defeat Democrat Jimmy Carter and win in his own right the presidency he attained as an appointed vice president, succeeding to office because of another man's scandal and resignation.
"The chair declares that the nominee of this convention for president of the United States is Gerald R. Ford," said Rhodes, when the roll call of the states was done.
The band played, the Ford signs waved anew. First Lady Betty Ford and the family's children joined in an embrace at their front-row seats. Nancy Reagan had left the hall earlier.
Downcast Reagan supporters looked on. Their man had come close, surprisingly close to an incumbent president. But they had known for 24 hours that it was all over, for Ford's performance strength showed in a Tuesday night test vote.
There was evidence of the Republican split when Gov. James Edwards of South Carolina, a Reagan supporter, move to make the nomination unanimous. Some Reagan men booed, turned thumbs down.
Reagan telephoned the California delegation and asked that his home-state supporters make the motion for unanimity, but there was dissent there, too.
Actually, the Republican rules left it to Rhodes, the chairman, to move for nomination by acclamation. He said it and it was done.
So two years and nine days into his accidental term as successor to Richard M. Nixon, ford took command of his divided party for the campaign to hold the White House against Carter.
After hours of speeches, demonstrations, ding on the convention floor, the call of the Republican roll was delayed until near midnight.
Ford was entered in nomination as a president by circumstance whose performance has earned the right to "the American mandate."
Reagan's nominating speech was delivered by his campaign chairman, who pledged that "regardless of how these cards fall" in the roll call on a nominee, he and the challenger will labor for the Republican ticket.
Records turn came first, and Sen. Paul Laxalt of Nevada entered his name, beginning with a gesture of unity.
"We are both extremely interested in the candidacy but we're first both Republicans. Let me assure you that regardless of how these cards fall tonight, Ronald Reagan and Paul Laxalt will work firmly behind the Republican ticket.
Laxalt called Reagan the electable entry, "the finest candidate to come before a Republican convention in recent years."
But the speech, and the sign-waving uproar that followed were for a candidate whose challenge already had been proven short of votes in a pivotal, prelude test at the convention.
Williamsburg, Va. (AP) - What ails the campaign ailed the debates, and neither President Ford nor Jimmy Carter seems bent on curing it, despite their promises to take the high road and deal with the real issues.
For each candidate has been pending against created, in some instances distorted perceptions of the other and his positions. The habit and the strategy may be too ingrained to change as the days dwindle down toward the election of a president.
In 4 1/2 hours of nationally televised debates, neither Ford nor Carter broke major new ground. Instead the debates were a process of rhetoric and rebuttal, with few memorable moments.
The 27 minutes off the air, when the sound failed during the first debate in Philadelphia, probably registers in more memories now than anything that was said when the system was working.
In San Francisco, the high point was a blunder, Ford's flat statement that there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.
It provided a week's diversion, although Ford finally admitted that he had erred.
In Williamsburg on Friday night, the debate finale was a study in etiquette, with both contestants wary of error in word or in image in the last crucial phase of a close campaign.
An early question by Robert C. Maynard of The Washington Post summed up the campaign ailment. He said the indications are that voters are turned off by the low level of a campaign that has digressed from important issues into charges about brainwashing and blunders and Carter's interview with Playboy.
In turn, the candidates said they have no intention of spending the balance of the campaign discussing anything but the real concerns of the people.
"I hope that we can leave those issues in the next 10 days about personalities and mistakes of the past - we both made some mistakes - and talk about unemployment, housing, education, taxation, government organization, stripping away of secrecy," Carter said.
Ford confessed to "rather graphic language," and pledged to try to stimulate the voters, to enlarge what now is expected to be a low Election Day turnout.
Carter said later that Ford's advertising for the rest of the campaign will concentrate on personal attacks on him and untrue statements about his positions.
It may well: That's the way both candidates who played it so far.
Carter said Ford was brainwashed about Eastern Europe, shows callous disregard for America's unemployed and is an incompetent leader.
For his part, Ford has claimed Carter would increase taxes at all Americans earning over $14,000 a year, I wants to cut the defense budget by up to $15 billion.
Carter said that neither is so, but that has not altered the Republican attack.
In fact, behind the rhetoric, the two men generally agree on goals: More jobs, less inflation, a balanced federal budget, a strong national defense.
Carter doesn't want to raise taxes on half the population, and the Republicans know it. Ford doesn't want massive unemployment, and the Democrats know that.
In fact, the complaints of campaign-watchers who say the candidates are not talking about the issues are unfounded. Carter and Ford speak regularly of taxes, jobs, inflation.
But each side is so intent on attacking its created perceptions of the other that the campaign has all but ignored the real difference between the candidates: The proper way to attain common goals that are about as controversial as motherhood.
Carter's is the more interventionist course. He would have government do more, and probably cost more. But he is no all-out liberal. There was a note of caution in the debate as he promised to work for high goals, great things. "We might have to do it slowly," he said.
Ford, counted among the more conservative Republicans in his congressional days, list of the system will work best without massive spending programs, with less reliance on government and more on business and the individual.
In Friday night's debate, that difference was summed up in one exchange, on civil rights and government programs to help blacks and other minorities.
"...We we've carried out the law to the letter and I'm proud of the record," said Ford.
"It doesn't take just a quiet or minimum enforcement of the law," Carter replied. " it requires an aggressive searching out and reaching out to help people who especially need it."
It is not dramatic, certainly not as much fun as Playboy and the other detours in the campaign. But it does go to the point.
So, indeed, did Friday night's discussions of such issues as the environment, city problems, energy. As Carter said, it wasn't very exciting.
But the process is not supposed to be one of entertainment. It is supposed to let people know where their vote on November 2nd may lead them.
Gerald R. Ford, who never sought the presidency until he held it, and Jimmy Carter, the driving, self-started Democratic challenger, come to judgment on Tuesday.
By the standard measurements, Carter leads narrowly, with signs of erosion and of a late Ford advance.
However, this is not a standard election, this contest to restore the seal of voter approval to a White House that is lacked it for 27 months.
And the measurements the counts two last days of campaigning by the appointed Republican president and by the Democratic nominee who lifted himself out of obscurity to the brink of power.
It will be registered on Tuesday in the polling booths of 176,877 precincts, from the Maine dawn to the California evening. It may be registered I only about half the Americans who could vote if they chose.
Thus the winner will probably be the choice of little more than one-quarter of the nation's voting-age citizens. That may not be a compelling mandate from the people, but it will nonetheless return the White House to voter custody, be it Carter or Ford who is chosen to take office next January 20th.
The Electoral College arithmetic leans Carter's way, and Ford is confronted what's a list of must states, sudden-death contests, any one of which could be his undoing.
A presidential election is not one contest, but 51, in every state and the District of Columbia for the 270 electoral votes that will make a president.
"If we don't win states like Illinois, it will be virtually impossible to win the election," Ford said. Add to that states like Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and California. Ford's strategists acknowledge he must sweep them to make the presidency his own.
With his presumed base of Southern support, and as the candidate of the stronger party, Carter could assemble an Electoral College majority without such a sweep.
But there were worrisome portents for the Democrats in a late California poll that showed Ford six points ahead there, engine campaign surveys that indicate Carter is slipping in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
A Ford campaign official claimed on Friday that the president now leads in states with enough electoral votes to win the election.
Furthermore, with Election Day at hand, the public opinion analysts report a persistently high level of indecision in the electorate, and that, too, clouds the indicators.
It has been a campaign without compelling issues, a campaign structured around three nationally televised debates which are in retrospect more important for the fact that they were held then for anything that was said.
With Ford, the signal issue has been the fact that he is president, that he has a record of performance in office to match against what he calls Carter's wavering, waffling promises.
Carter's central thrust has been a challenge to Ford's competence to handle the job he holds, together with pledges to put people back to work, overhaul the tax code, and reform the very structure of government itself.
He styled himself as the outsider, come to change the establishment.
As Americans choose a president, they also will elect a new Congress, with continued Democratic control a sure thing. They will elect 14 governors, and settle thousands of local contests and questions.
There are now 62 Democratic senators, 38 Republicans, and that balance of political power is not likely to change much. The election will, however, change the face of the Senate. Eight incumbents have retired among them Democratic leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and Republican leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania.
All told, 22 Democratic and 11 Republican Senate seats are at stake this year.
The incumbents in deepest trouble include Democrat Vance Hartke of Indiana, up against former Indianapolis Mayor Richard G. Lugar; Republican J. Glenn Bell of Maryland, trailing Rep. Paul Sarbanes; and Conservative-Republican James Buckley of New York, the underdog against former U.N. Ambassador Daniel P. Moynihan.
In the House, Democrats dominate by a 2-to-1 margin, 290 seats to 145. Even they expect the Republicans to regain 10 or 12 of the 43 seats the GOP lost in the 1974 congressional elections, just after the Watergate scandals.
Republicans talk of gaining 20 seats or more. But either way, both sides foresee a comfortable Democratic majority in the 95th Congress.
14 states are electing governors this year, at least three of them, the statehouse contests could prove a boon to Ford against Carter.
Republican Govs. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri and Otis R. Bowen of Indiana are favored to win landslides that could help the top of the GOP ticket. In Illinois, former U.S. Attorney James R. Thompson is the runaway leader over Democrat Michael J. Howlett, and there, too, the coattails could aid the president.
There is another hard-to-measure factor in the presidential race, the name of Eugene J. McCarthy. He is entered as an independent candidate in 29 states, turn in Concepts like those of Illinois, Wisconsin and California, he could pull away enough liberal Democratic votes to turn the outcome in Ford's favor if the count is close.
In addition, former Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox is on the ballots of 20 states as the American Independent Party candidate.
But the pull of party, magnified by the absence of a compelling reason to defect, should be an asset to Carter. Party loyalties have waned, but the Democrats still are stronger, particularly in the big, industrial states that count most in the Electoral College. The Democrats and organized labor have staged an intensive drive to sign up new voters.
By most calculations, the bigger the turnout of voters, the better for Carter.
Four years ago, about 55 per cent of the potential electorate cast presidential ballots. This time, the percentage showing could well be lower, perhaps below half. The trend is downward. Turnout in the last five presidential elections was averaged 62 per cent.
And there is no evidence that Ford or Carter, separately or jointly, have managed to turn on the electorate in a fashion that would bring out a heavy vote.
There are about 150 million Americans of voting age, and about two-thirds of them are registered to cast ballots.
Now comes their choice, after an extraordinary campaign.
When it began, Carter wasn't even listed in the polls on Democratic opinion. Yet he climbed swiftly to command of his party while Ford was still struggling to edge Ronald Reagan for the Republican nomination.
It is the first campaign ever to be financed with public funds, $21.8 million in checked-off tax dollars for each candidate.
Ford is a unique incumbent, come to office through appointment as vice president to Richard M. Nixon, resigned Aug. 9, 1974.
By midsummer, Carter was a towering 33 percentage points ahead of Ford in George Gallup's poll. Now, on the basis of mid-October interviews, Gallup makes it Carter 47 per cent, Ford 41 per cent, undecided 12 per cent.
Louis Harris surveys on Oct. 19 and 20 indicated a three-point Carter lead. A Harris survey announced Friday showed the lead had narrowed to only one point.
The early pollsters' odds led Ford to a move that has become customary for the underdog. He challenged Carter to debate. It hadn't been done in a presidential campaign in 16 years, and no incumbent had never agreed to a debate.
So they debated, or, more accurately, appeared jointly to respond to questions put by panels of reporters. In three 90-minute sessions, at intervals of about two weeks, Ford and Carter dropped everything for the nationally televised encounters. In prospect, they had loomed as the decisive arenas of the campaign.
In performance, it didn't work out that way. Neither man seized a clear advantage. The biggest single item to emerge from their 4 1/2 hours on the platform together was Ford's insistence that there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. That and 27 minutes of silence from Philadelphia when the sound broke down.
The Ford comment on Europe, like much of the campaign grist, was more diversion than issue. Ford finally admitted he had erred.
There was in addition a vice-presidential debate, matching Democratic Sen. Walter F. Mondale and Republican Sen. Robert J. Dole.
In that one, Dole said that both world wars, Korea and Vietnam were "Democrat wars." Two weeks later, after controversy and elaborations which included Dole's comment that he had reservations about World War II, he denied he'd ever said it.
Both Dole and Mondale roamed the nation from Labor Day to Election Day. Harris said his surveys showed that Mondale was an asset worth two or three percentage points to the Democratic ticket.
In the late days of the campaign, Carter reminded almost every audience that Mondale was running with him. Ford did not customarily mention his running mate.
What Ford and Carter could not do in their televised debates, they could not do in person: Neither candidate found the issue or the image to turn the trend decisively in his direction.
Every time it seemed about to happen, something intervened. Usually something they'd said.
Carter was riding high when, in declining to disclose details of his promised tax reform, he left an opening which Republicans seized upon to claim that he would increase taxes for half the population. Then he turned up in Playboy magazine, with interview comments about lust and adultery.
Ford seemed to be gaining headway when Earl Butz had to quit the Cabinet for slurring blacks, and when Ford had to explain away his own misstatement on Eastern Europe.
Detours like those kept both candidates explaining themselves, clarifying what had gone before instead of concentrating on positive themes, or on telling attacks against the other.
So the campaign charts were zigzag, up one week down the next. But even with his periodic setbacks, Ford was closing the summer's wide gap in the polls, saying as he embarked on his final and most intensive campaign journey that he has in position "to pull off the political surprise of the century and come back and win."
His problem was compounded by an economic downturn in mid-campaign. Ford called it a pause in a solid recovery from the recession. Carter said it was evidence that the Republican administration has made a mess of the economy.
In the final debate, on Oct. 22, Carter said it was shameful for Ford to boast about economic progress when 7 1/2 million people were out of work. He said a Democratic administration would curb unemployment, but it was a promise short on specific methods.
In foreign policy, Ford claimed experience, pointed to peace, promised a strong America. Carter said the administration had forsaken morality in foreign policy, asserted that Ford had let Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger become de facto president for foreign affairs.
He said he would never permit subversion of a foreign government or use U.S. troops unless American security was directly threatened. At the same time, he criticized detente with the Soviet Union as too one-sided, and by the time he was through criticizing Ford's remark about Eastern Europe, Carter sounded like the more hawkish of the two.
Yet at the same time, he was calling for defense spending cuts of $5 billion to $7 billion - and Ford was saying that would spell disaster for U.S. security, boasting that he has proposed the biggest military budgets in history.
Carter campaigned intensively, from Labor Day on with breaks for the debates and for regular respites at his home in Plains, Ga. He traveled over 50,000 miles, made about 100 stops, campaigned in about 40 states.
Ford spent most of the eight-week campaign season at home, emphasizing his incumbency and campaigning in the White House or the Rose Garden, until the final debate. Then he set out on an intensive, 10-day blitz, aimed largely at the big, battleground states. His campaign has covered about half the states, with repeated appearances in the key ones. Buoyed by his private polls, he showed up in New York, once thought to be beyond his Election Day reach, and in Texas, which would be a major Southern prize if he could gain it.
As Ford stepped up his travels, his organization stepped up campaign television, budgeted for $12 million, with nationwide advertisements, and 30-minute shows in the key states. Joe Garrasiola, the former big league catcher who now is a sports commentator, was the master of ceremonies, interviewer and cheerleader.
Ford's campaign tone shifted more than once from hard line attack to presidential restraint.
Carter's tone changed, too. He emerged in the first place styling himself as the candidate of competence, compassion and love, shunning the attack and saying he ran for himself, not against others. By September, he was denouncing Ford as a brainwashed president, accusing him of disgracing America, saying he had not accomplished a single thing in office. Then, abruptly, the hard line lapsed, with Carter noting pointedly that almost everything he does is done on purpose.
Just as purposefully, he sought to fine tune his image. At one point, he said he was intentionally emphasizing conservative tenets, like a balanced budget and a pay-as-you-go approach to costly new programs.
Through those turns and more, the campaign moved from the crowded, noisy area that belongs to candidates toward the silent solemnity of the polling booth.
It is topcoat weather now. Snow chased the candidates in Chicago last Wednesday as it had in New Hampshire nine weary months ago.
Then the choice was among a dozen men.
Now it is two.
And on Wednesday morning, it will be one.