six by similarly narrow margins. Kennedy carried all but three states in the populous Northeast, and he also carried the large states of Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri in the Midwest. With Lyndon Johnson's help, he also carried most of the South, including the large states of North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Nixon carried all but three of the Western states (including California), and he ran strong in the farm belt states, where his biggest victory was in Ohio. The New York Times, summarizing the discussion in late November, spoke of a "narrow consensus" among the experts that Kennedy had won more than he lost "as a result of his Catholicism", as Northern Catholics flocked to Kennedy because of attacks on his religion. Interviewing people who voted in both 1956 and 1960, a University of Michigan team analyzing the election returns discovered that people who voted Democratic in 1956 split 33–6 for Kennedy, while the Republican voters of 1956 split 44–17 for Nixon. That is, Nixon lost 28% () of the Eisenhower voters, while Kennedy lost only 15% of the Stevenson voters. The Democrats, in other words, did a better job of holding their 1956 supporters. Kennedy said that he saw the challenges ahead and needed the country's support to get through them. In his victory speech, he declared: "To all Americans, I say that the next four years are going to be difficult and challenging years for us all; that a supreme national effort will be needed to move this country safely through the 1960s. I ask your help, and I can assure you that every degree of my spirit that I possess will be devoted to the long-range interest of the United States and to the cause of freedom around the world." Controversies Some Republicans believed that Kennedy had benefited from vote fraud, especially in Texas, where his running mate Lyndon B. Johnson was senator, and Illinois, home of Mayor Richard Daley's powerful Chicago political machine. These two states were important because if Nixon had carried both, he would have earned 270 electoral votes, one more than the 269 needed to win the presidency. Republican senators such as Everett Dirksen and Barry Goldwater claimed vote fraud "played a role in the election", and that Nixon actually won the national popular vote. Republicans tried, and failed, to overturn the results in both Illinois and Texas at the time, as well