One group of election-day losers not much commented about were pollsters who had predicted extremely tight battle over Senate. “While I wouldn’t call it a debacle,” said John Brennan, an ABC News polling analyst, “I don’t think it was a great year for pollsters.” . . . Democratic pollster Peter Hart agrees: “Polling ranged all over the lot.” . . . And Tom Griscom of the Republican Senatorial Committee reports that while they saw a surge in Democratic figures in final days of campaign, “it was hard to gauge how steep the slide was.” For instance, six days before election, ABC News/ Washington Post had Republicans Ken Kramer (Colo.), James Abdnor (S.D.), and Slade Gorton (Wash.) winning, and Steve Symms (Idaho) losing. Only Symms won. . . . How badly hurt is the GOP? The Washington Post’s David Broder says Paul Kirk’s triumphant election-night “the Democrats are back” just ain’t so. “The biggest mistake the Democrats can make is to believe that the 1986 election confirmed them as the majority party in the country,” he writes. … A Christian Science Monitor analysis predicts that Reagan will not be as badly hurt as some think, because “the Democrats will be afraid of being ‘Mondalized’ on tax increases and ‘Carterized’ on Nicaragua and other foreign-policy issues.” . . . Sen. Lawton Chiles (D., Fla.), who will be taking over chairmanship of all-important Budget Committee, sees no startling changes ahead. “We’re a group that has been working together for a long time. We’re all fiscal conservatives and pragmatists.” But he adds: “I’m scared to death [of the deficit]. It’s like being given the captaincy of the Titanic after hitting the iceberg.”
Wrapping it up: Jimmy Carter got a belated day in court. Three members of his Cabinet made the political big-time. Cecil Andrus was elected governor of Idaho; Neil Goldschmidt, governor of Oregon; Brock Adams, senator from Washington. … In an otherwise gloomy night, Republicans scored important gubernatorial gains in the South: Bob Martinez became the first Cuban-American governor of Florida, Guy Hunt replaced George Wallace in Alabama, and Bill Clements beat out incumbent Mark White in Texas. . . . An Equal Rights Amendment was KOed in Vermont, and “if ERA can’t make it in liberal Vermont,” says UV Prof. Garrison Nelson, “it can’t make it anywhere.” . . . Rose Bird and two liberal colleagues were voted off the California Supreme Court, but moves to get rid of anti-death-penalty justices in North Carolina and Oklahoma failed. . . . California became the seventh state to adopt English as its legal language, and Idaho retained its right-to-work law. . . . Massachusetts and Nebraska became the first states to rescind mandatory seatbelt laws. . . . Not only did all state anti-abortion referenda lose, but three pro-abortion candidates won Senate seats: Wyche Fowler (Ga.), Tom Daschle (S.D.), and Terry Sanford (N.C.). . . . Harold Stassen, 79, lost a bid for a Minnesota House seat but comments that he’s not ready for a rocking chair yet. . . . In Wyoming, candidate Rick Gilmore went to the well 702 times, and was turned down by that many PACs. “That’s how it goes when you’re a Democrat in Wyoming,” he commented, shortly before disappearing under a Richard Cheney avalanche. . . . In general it was a grand year for House incumbents: 386 were returned to office, only six (one Democrat, five Republicans) lost. … In Chicago, the spirit of Mayor Daley lives on: The Committee for Honest Elections found that 34,538 people in Cook County were registered to vote twice. . . . And write-in candidate Agnes T. Frog, running for Douglas County Commissioner in Kansas, did remarkably well (1,850 votes to the incumbent’s 4,886), considering that Agnes is—a frog.
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