Word: factoring
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Reasons. What happened? There were several explanations, none of them adequate, all of them providing slivers of truth. Most pundits and politicos settled on unemployment as the major factor in the Democratic sweep. The U.S. Labor Department lists eight counties in Pennsylvania where unemployment is in the critical range of 10% or more of the working population. Some 377,000 Pennsylvanians are jobless; 120,000 have exhausted their unemployment compensation ($30 a week for 26 weeks); uncounted thousands more are what George Leader calls "underemployed," i.e., working less than 40 hours a week. A week before Election Day, a riot...
...unemployment was not the only factor in Pennsylvania; it was not even the deciding factor. In other states (e.g., Ohio and Indiana), where unemployment is serious, the Republicans held up well. And in Pennsylvania the Democrats would have won by 60,000 votes even without the big cities and the depressed coal areas...
...second factor was the unpopularity of Republican Governor John Fine's administration and a Pandora's box of contributing local issues. Added to this, the Republicans ran a poor campaign with an unfortunate candidate. Lieutenant Governor Lloyd Wood, a cigar-chomping politician. Wood had to carry all of the liabilities and secured none of the assets of the Republican organization's 100-year-old reputation. The evil that political machines do lives long after their effectiveness is gone...
...Another factor was the recent and rapid Democratic upsurge in eastern Pennsylvania. In 1951 the Democrats won the Philadelphia mayoralty, interrupting 67 years of Republican rule at City Hall. In 1952 Adlai Stevenson took the city by 162,000 votes-an election freak that bewildered the experts and bothered the Republican National Committee. It should have jogged the Republicans of Pennsylvania out of their complacency, but it didn...
...election of Michigan's Truman Newberry in 1918, for example, lit a bonfire that was to burn in the Senate for four years, and finally became a major factor in the Democrats' success in the 1922 Congressional elections. Newberry, it seems, was guilty of passing out cigars wrapped in tinfoil and $10 bills. No-one would have been outraged if he had distributed them democratically, but unfortunately the Senator gave the tinfoiled cigars to known Democrats, while the $10 variety went to Republican and undecided voters. The Senate, furthermore, chose not to accept Newberry's plea that he was educating...