National Affairs: NEW YORK: Anatomy of a Key State

THE man who takes New York’s 45 electoral votes is already one-sixth of the way to victory. The state is traditionally Republican in presidential races, though Native Son Franklin Roosevelt carried it four times. Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 swept Adlai Stevenson out to sea by 1,500,000 votes. No other state quite matches New York’s size, political tensions and racial-religious groupings. But basically the same building blocks, juggled and rearranged, make up the political structures of most of the other key industrial states where the 1960 election will be won or lost. Mostly Democratic New York City has 40% of the voters, its mostly-Republican suburbs have 20%, and the remaining 40% are “upstate”—in a green and generally Republican fruit-and-dairy farmland dotted by a few grey and generally Democratic cities. Last week TIME Correspondent John L. Steele made soundings in all three areas, reported that Jack Kennedy stands to carry New York by a margin ranging from 250,000 to 500,000 votes.

The City

New York City’s five boroughs, the nation’s heaviest concentration of population, in 1956 cast 3,200,000 votes—against 3,900,000 for the rest of the state. Thus the key figure is this: a Democrat must usually capture a 700,000-vote majority in the city to breast the upstate Republican tide. (Adlai Stevenson carried the city by a humiliatingly low 69,500 in 1956.)

This year the local Democratic organization is Balkanized —the Eleanor Roosevelt rebels do not talk to Tammany Hall Boss Carmine De Sapio and the other organization regulars—but all sides heaved together under Kennedy direction to ring out a record 3,622,000 registration of voters. Compared with 1956, registration is up 40,000 in The Bronx, 58,000 in Manhattan, 105,000 in Brooklyn’s Kings County, all of which went for Stevenson. Yet the greatest gain of all, 115,000, came in Queens, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1936. Politicos figure that most of Queens’ new registrants are immigrants from Democratic Brooklyn and The Bronx.

New York City itself is a conglomerate of minorities that make up a majority. The city’s Irish-Catholic population, 1,000,000 strong and predominantly Roman Catholic, swung against Adlai Stevenson, partly out of the appeal of Mc-Carthyism and doubts about Stevenson’s firmness against Communism. The religion issue seems to have brought back most of them to the Democrats. Last week Pollster Samuel Lubell reported: “More than half the pro-Eisenhower Catholics interviewed in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens talk of voting for Senator Kennedy.” As for the city’s 2,400,000 Jews, their vague uneasiness about Kennedy (partially because his father, as U.S. Ambassador to Britain, opposed U.S. entry into the war against Nazi Germany, and partly because of Jack Kennedy’s own tardiness in denouncing the late Joseph McCarthy) is balanced by a vague equating of Nixon with McCarthy (and helped out by the word that he signed the standard deeds with “restrictive covenants” when buying homes in Washington and Whittier, Calif.). Historically Democratic (some 70% for Stevenson in 1956), the Jews are expected to go largely for Kennedy.

Oddly, Kennedy’s religion may hurt him somewhat among the 980,000 Negroes, for most of them are Baptists who heed their preachers—and who are not unaware that their toughest battles for housing have come in Irish and Polish Catholic neighborhoods. New York Negroes voted 79% Democratic in 1952, then slid to 63% in 1956. Even though the Baptist pastor of Harlem’s biggest church, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, is a latter-day Kennedy man, the Democratic majority among Negroes is expected to erode some more this year, but it should still be a Kennedy majority.

The Suburbs

Traditionally rich and two-thirds Republican, the commuter suburbs are changing. Huge middle-class migrations from the city in the past decade have doubled the population of Long Island’s Nassau County to 1,300,000 (bigger than Baltimore), while the size of neighboring Suffolk County has increased by 140%, to 660,000. The newcomers drive Chevys instead of Cadillacs, and some 60% are Catholics.

Voter registration has grown by a third since 1956, and its fruits hang mostly on the Democratic tree. Nassau’s most reliably Republican First Assembly District gained the fewest new voters in the county, its most heavily Democratic Fourth District had the most pickups, and Democrats have been whittling Republican majorities in local races. In Nassau’s Oyster Bay, home of Teddy Roosevelt and now of Nixon Campaign Chairman Len Hall, the Democratic tide in local elections swelled from 28% in 1952 to 46% in 1958. In all, the suburbs are expected to carry for Nixon by margins much lower than in 1956.

Upstate

Republican tradition goes with Nixon upstate, but the issues of recession and religion are against him in cities where Catholics are many and jobs are scarce.

Unemployment has crept above 6% in Buffalo, Albany, Schenectady, Utica. Troy, Amsterdam. In Buffalo, the far-off issue of Quemoy-Matsu means less than the close-to-home issues of unemployment compensation, minimum wage, medical aid for the aged—and religion, for Buffalo is 60% Catholic. Rochester, which has voted for the presidential winner in ten consecutive elections, has a newly vigorous Democratic organization, important labor, sizable groups of Jews and Negroes, a big Catholic vote—all favoring Kennedy. In Catholic areas, Democrats have put to good use the film of Jack Kennedy’s stand in the lions’ den of Houston Protestant preachers. Snorted one G.O.P. leader in Rome, N.Y.: “Every time one of those blankety-blank Southerners opens his mouth about the Catholic Church, we lose 20 votes for Nixon up here.”

Upstate’s well-to-do dairy farmers are predominantly Protestant, devoutly Republican, and no friends of Democratic-favored high-farm-price props (which would only boost their bills for feed grain). In many a county that Ike carried by some 70,000 votes, Republican leaders are banking on the rural surge to put Nixon over—by about 20,000 votes. And this year 20,000 is not enough. Nixon will probably fall far short of the 800,000 to 1,000,000 Republican votes that a Republican needs to offset expected downstate Democratic pluralities.