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Massachusetts. Like a homely Yankee trader, Republican Leverett Saltonstall is stumping the state in his five-year-old Mercury, meeting the people on a personal level ("You lost many Dutch elms?"), bridging his eloquence gap with a powerful homespun personality and the constant reminder of past favors. At the Andover town hall, a man nudged him, beaming: "You got my boy in Annapolis." At a Lawrence electronics factory, a foreman observed: "Eighty percent of the people in the plant are Democrats. Most of us will vote for Salty. It means jobs, you know."
Tom O'Connor, the wiry young mayor of Springfield who upset favored Foster Furcolo to win the Democratic nomination (TIME, Sept. 26), is breathing hard on Salty's neck. With the endorsement of Kennedy, he whirls through a daily round of "Teas for Tom," banquets, speeches, rallies, living on one meal and 20 cups of coffee a day. Said he truthfully: "I'm definitely the underdog."
Michigan. Six months ago Senator Pat McNamara was a runaway favorite to win reelection, but Republican Congressman Alvin Bentley, campaigning diligently, has been so successful that local Republicans are watching the race with new hope. McNamara, a onetime president of the Detroit Pipefitters Union, has the backing of the old-line A.F.L. and Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers. He is a deplorable mumbler on the speakers' rostrum and a delightful mixer at voters' gatherings, has been taking great pains to demonstrate his good health (he was operated on for cancer last July), appearing without a topcoat in the chilly Upper Peninsula. Conservative Multimillionaire Bentley, proud of his backing for the late Joe McCarthy, has made sizable inroads on the ethnic vote (he has learned to speak passable Polish and Magyar, has won the endorsement of the normally Democratic Polish-American Congress). He wades recklessly into sticky subjects, bluntly brought up the question of McNamara's health and charged Jack Kennedy with deliberately fanning the religious issue in order to woo Catholics. Jews and other minorities. Bentley is a bit of a grandstander, still displays the riddled wallet he carried when he was badly wounded during the 1954 shoot-'em-up in the House chamber by three Puerto Ricans. McNamara retains a lead, based on his huge majorities in Wayne County (Detroit), but Bentley is gaining.
Missouri. Lieutenant Governor Ed Long stepped into a Democratic brawl when he was nominated to succeed the late Tom Hennings. A farmer-banker-lawyer from Pike County, he wears sharp-lapelled country-boy suits, is an ineffective speaker but an able public servant. His Republican adversary, St. Louis Lawyer Lon Hocker, is a better performer but short on campaign funds. The Democratic strife has cooled off, and with a fat campaign purse and a pulsating party machine behind him, Long is the favorite of the political morning line.