American democracy's Big Show is over. With all but a few scattered Western returns in, Fatal Tuesday follows the pattern of every off-year election save that of 1934 since the Civil War--resurgence of the President's loyal opposition. The Republican Party, which in the heyday of the New Deal held but a third of Congress and carried but two states in the fight for the presidency, is once again on the threshold of national power. Senate Republicans, while still a clear minority, have risen from complete impotence to a challenging position by picking up at least nine seats. The House, Democratic stronghold since the middle of the Hoover administration, shows a more startling doubt the Democrats appear to have retained a nominal majority by perhaps as little as half-a-dozen votes--a long drop from the margin of fifty-five with which they entered Tuesday's balloting. And in the nation as a whole Republican nominees replace Democratic governors in the three key states of New York, California, and Michigan.

Among those to founder in the Republican flood are such staunch Administration supporters as Senators Josh Lee, Parentis Brown, and George Norris; among those riding the tide to victory are such consummate Roosevelt-haters as Tom Dewey, Ham Fish, and "Curly" Brooks. Read as a chapter in American politics the 1942 elections stand as a clear-cut blat in the face of Democratic President Roosevelt--his severest and most significant check since his first election ten years ago.

But red in the record of a world at war Tuesday's elections sharply underline a significance far larger and far more ominous than any simple reaction against a New Deal adjusting too slowly to the management of a nation at war. The 1942 elections, held less than a year after Pearl Harbor, are a vote of mistrust in the president who saw what the war would mean to American before its outbreak in Europe--and the chose for American the part of courage and the part of right. The American people today place their trust in the Republican Party--the party of pre-Pearl Harbor isolation--to win the war and to make the peace. But to make a place is to know why are has been fought; the party which holds with Senator Robert Taft that this world can live half slave and half free does not know why this war is being fought. Today the American people are bagging bigger game than George Norris or Franklin Roosevelt. They wound their allies. They snipe at democracy. They are shooting themselves.