New Swing Voting Bloc To Decide New York Race

The four-way race for Governor of New York is about to consummate a revolution of sorts in the politics of that state. Not because the Liberal Party has nominated its own candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. Nor because the Conservative Party is for the first time threatening to outpoll the Liberals in a state-wide race and thus become the number three party in the state. What is really important is that the swing voting block, which has dominated New York state politics for more than twenty years, is about to be supplanted by an entirely different and often hostile bloc.

The old bloc is, of course, made up of New York City liberals (both large and small L). It is safe, and probably not irrelevant, to say that most of these voters are Jewish. Though in political elections they tend to vote heavily Democratic, they have cherished a long-time hostility to local Democrats. They have always mistrusted the Irish and other Democratic "bosses" in the City, and have felt (sometimes correctly) that these men had an insufficient regard for civil liberties and for liberal positions on other non-bread-and-butter issues.

The City liberal bloc has been decisive in the string of Republican successes in New York during the last twenty-five years. They have cheerfully deserted Democrats for Dewey, Ives, Javits, Rockefeller, Lefkowitz, Keating, and, most recently, Lindsay. In local races, they traditionally shun those Democrats against whom the Liberals have run their own candidate or supported the Republican.

The City liberals are unusually articulate people, and they have long understood the tremendous power of their political leverage. Recently they have become increasingly finicky about supporting Democrats, and fickle in their preferences. For example, two years ago they were the shrillest opponents of Robert Kennedy, and today they like to claim him as one of their own. Their specific objections to the current Democratic candidate for Governor, Frank O'Connor, boil down to two minor, long-since repudiated incidents in the early 1950's. Their real objection seems to lie in the fact that most City liberals just naturally assume that a Roman Catholic from Queens who was a District Attorney and head of the New York State Elks just has to be some kind of reactionary McCarthyite, despite any evidence to the contrary. Although O'Connor has consistently opposed capital punishment and compulsory civil commitment of drug addicts, and is strongly supporting Mayor Lindsay's civilian review board, many City liberals still insist on seeing him as a pawn of the reactionary Archbishop of Brooklyn.

No Place To Go

But if City liberals instinctively dislike O'Connor, they have no one place to go this year. Many will probably vote for Rockefeller, and others, reluctantly, for O'Connor. FDR Jr., whose liberal credentials are not as strong as O'Connor's, brings to mind the remark (originally made about William Scranton) that he is not half the man his mother was. Everyone knows that Liberal Party boss Alex Rose picked him as the Party's best chance to keep third place in the state and Line C on the ballot for the next four years. (The Liberal Party always does much better when it does not endorse Democrats than when it does.) The Liberals' diminishing vote has clearly forced them to oppose Democrats whenever they can -- rather than, as was the original raison d'etre of their party, whenever they ought to.

The new swing block in New York might best be called the Kennedy bloc. It consists mainly of middle-class and working-class Upstaters and suburbanites, a large majority of them Italian, Polish, and Irish Catholics, who used to vote Republican as a matter of course. They were Upstaters, and Upstaters voted Republican. Robert Kennedy in 1964 changed all that. Although he did not run particularly strong in the city (city liberals were, as usual, busy being finicky and discovering all the hidden virtues of the Republican candidate), he undercut Keating by actually carrying Upstate New York and losing the suburban counties by only 25,000 votes. By comparison, President Kennedy lost Upstate by 400,000 and the suburban counties by 150,000 in 1960. The Kennedy block apparently had little affection for Keating or other Republicans who seemed to spend most of their time running after city liberal votes. And so, when a sufficiently attractive Democrat came along, they were quick to bolt party lines.

They will be similarly quick to bolt when a sufficiently unattractive Republican comes along -- and in Upstate New York, that means Nelson Rockefeller. Kennedy bloc voters apparently always considered Rockefeller, in his hot pursuit of city liberal votes, shifty and untrustworthy. His divorce and remarriage confirmed all their suspicions. Rockefeller's ultra-expensive campaign, with its clever Jack Tinker Agency ads, seems unlikely to convince these people that he can be trusted.

Senator Robert Kennedy's strategy in encouraging and appealing to the new Kennedy bloc has become increasingly clear during the campaign. The Kennedys have never thought highly of Nelson Rockefeller, and the Senator would sincerely like to beat him this year. And he would just as soon do it with his own personal bloc of voters as with Alex Rose's or the West Side Reform Democrats'. So when the Liberals indicated that they would refuse to endorse O'Connor, and city liberals began to grumble and screech, Kennedy calmly ignored them and, by not endorsing anyone, locked up the nomination for O'Connor.

Dully Predictable

Since then, the Senator has backed O'Connor far more strongly than, as titular party leader, he has to. His brother-in-law Stephen Smith is O'Connor's de facto campaign manager and seems to be getting on well with the O'Connor team. Kennedy staffers in key Upstate cities are spending all their time on the O'Connor campaign. The Senator himself will appear with O'Connor in places like Buffalo and Syracuse, for he knows that an O'Connor victory, on the strength of Kennedy bloc votes, will make the junior Senator unquestionably the strongest man in New York politics.

With all this going on beneath the surface, the campaign itself is dully predictable. The usual charges of bossism against the Democrats have been made by the city liberals, FDR Jr., and the Republicans. But the course of the state party conventions reduced them to absurdity: while the Republican, Liberal, and Conservative conventions went docilely through the motions of nominating the unpopular and unknown candidates their party bosses had long since chosen, the Democrats got into a real fight over the Lieutenant-Governorship. They ended up nominating the genuinely attractive Howard Samuels, who was the original choice of none of the "bosses." The surprising nomination of Samuels has made every subsequent charge of Democratic bossism ring increasingly hollow.

After the pathetically rigged Liberal convention, Alex Rose told reporters that his own polls showed that, even if Roosevelt won 500,000 votes, O'Connor would still beat Rockefeller by 600,000. He was, in effect, trying to save his own political skin by doing what he knew in his heart was wrong. He was also recognizing, sadly, the shift of political leverage in New York state from the city liberal to the Upstate Kennedy block. All that remains to be said is that Rose's poll was accurate enough, and that with or without the city liberals, O'Connor should win in November