WASHINGTON, D.C., Nov. 3--A new Democratic party was born tonight. This once rancous, irreverent, and factions coalition has become the most powerful and popular party in the Western world, and with power has come a respectability approaching stuffiness.

Sensing this new status, the Democratic National Committee staged tonight's victory ball in Washington's most sedate, tasteful and elegant hotel: The May-flower. Along the gently curving balconies of the ballroom, party employees draped slender streamers of bunting dotted with tiny LBJ-HHH stickers. At each end of the room hung modestly sized portraits of the ticket mates, both pale and humorless.

As the room filled and midnight approached, one listened in vain for those lovably tortured strains of "Happy Days Are Here Again." In vain one looked for those portly ward lackeys with equally pudgy cigars. In vain one tried to sense the electricity of unabashed partisanship.

All in vain, for last night the Democratic Party abandoned the haze of cigar smoke for the gray glow of television. On each end of the narrow ball room, the Democrats set up ten-foot TV screens, and most of the party regulars spent the evening giued silently and domestically to them. Occasionally the President's face would spread across the screens, huge and winking, and the crowd would raise drinks in a listless rebel yell.

More important than foreknowledge of victory, however, was the fact that no one in the ballroom felt at home with this unusual new party, this Texas-tent that Johnson had thrown over the strangest of political bed-fellows.

Through the years, Boston's Irish had learned to live with Georgia's crackers, but now they were both being elbowed aside by Midwestern half-conservatives and Scrantonish representatives of the Establishment. Smack in the middle of this greatest of party extravagansas there were knots of newly converted Republicans, weeping involuntarily for Keating and Percy.

What had happened was not so much Johnson but Goldwater. Though the Arizona Senator's candidacy has no doubt destroyed the Republican Party, it has also incapacitated the Democratic Party by infusing it with so much love, so much consensus and so much ideological mushiness that no one will ever again be able to mean by "I am a Democrat" anything more than "I was against Goldwater."