Nation: New York: Bloc Vote?

It is often considered bad taste to talk about election results in racial or religious terms. Yet race and or religion are facts of political life. In New York, Irish Catholics held power for a long while. Then Italian Catholics made their move. Last summer Democratic Pollster Lou Harris urged that U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau be nominated for Governor against Nelson Rockefeller, if only because he could win what Harris considered the Jewish bloc vote. Harris was on the right track. As weak a candidate as Morgenthau turned out to be, he nevertheless held Rocky’s plurality below all expectations. In two other New York races, Republican Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz won re-election by 647,000, and the only Democrat to survive the statewide G.O.P. landslide was Comptroller Arthur Levitt, who won by 797,000.

The biggest winner anywhere in the U.S. was New York’s kinetic Republican Senator Jacob Javits, who piled up a plurality of nearly 1,000,000. Indeed, Javits did not need a bloc vote—such were his energies, his eloquencies and his abilities that he would probably have won by the same margin had he been a Buddhist.