National Affairs: NEW YORK: Anatomy of a Key State

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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.