Representative Charles E. Schumer cobbled together a surprisingly easy victory in the Senate race by piling up a huge plurality in New York City, keeping it competitive upstate and battling to a near draw in the suburbs, the very heart of Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato's political base.
Although Mr. D'Amato held his home base of Long Island, he did so by a diminished margin compared with past campaigns.
Mr. Schumer's success in those areas was based in part on gains he made among Jewish, Hispanic and women voters that were impressive even for a Democrat, according to exit polls.
Mr. D'Amato's support among Jewish voters slumped significantly this year while women, influenced in part by Mr. Schumer's position in support of abortion rights, broke heavily for the Democratic congressman. Mr. Schumer captured 59 percent of the women's vote.
Political analysts said that Mr. Schumer was helped with women voters by Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign visits and, indirectly, by the recent shooting of a Buffalo obstetrician that gave new urgency to the abortion debate. Mr. Schumer's advertisements had drawn attention to his own position in support of abortion rights, while painting Mr. D'Amato as an anti-abortion advocate.
Because of his strong showing in Erie County, Mr. Schumer avoided getting trounced upstate, as many other Democrats before him have. Mr. Schumer received 56 percent of the vote in Erie, even as Gov. George E. Pataki won the county easily. Mr. D'Amato's last Democratic challenger, Robert Abrams, the former Attorney General, also won Erie County in 1992, but narrowly.
Hank Morris, Mr. Schumer's political consultant, said he did not think there was any one region or voter bloc that had been critical.
But, clearly, there would have been less confetti at Schumer campaign parties if the Congressman had not steamrolled Senator D'Amato in New York City, where Mr. Schumer captured 75 percent of the vote. It was a margin equal to President Clinton's own impressive tally in 1996 and far surpassed the 61 percent garnered by Mr. Abrams.
Perhaps Mr. Schumer's most impressive performance was in Westchester County, a mercurial place where voters often ignore their own party affiliations. Mr. Abrams lost the county by 6 points in 1992. Mr. Schumer took it by 8 points Tuesday, again despite a strong showing by Governor Pataki, who won the county handily.
Mr. Schumer's aides said they thought his positions on abortion and gun control were attractive to the many moderate Westchester residents. ''The county is also more diverse and more Democratic than it used to be,'' said Howard Wolfson, the campaign's communications director.
Over the last eight years, Westchester has seen double-digit increases in its black, Hispanic and Asian populations while the number of registered Democrats has soared. Democrats now have a 40,000-voter edge in registrations.
State Senator Nicholas A. Spano, the Westchester Republican chairman, said that the Democrats' registration edge had hurt but that so did the sense that Mr. D'Amato's incumbency had become a liability. ''The biggest problem was the fact that Al D'Amato was there for 18 years and people were just looking for a change,'' he said.
Joseph Mondello, the Nassau County Republican chairman, cited the same reason for the Senator's disappointing showing on Long Island, where he won, but not by the margins he was accustomed to.
In Nassau County, where Mr. Damato pulled 58 percent of the vote in 1992, his total dropped to 53 percent. In Suffolk, where pulled 59 percent last time, he got only 52 percent.
Mr. Schumer won only a slightly higher percentage of the black vote, 86 percent, than Mr. Abrams had in 1992. But he captured a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote, 82 percent, compared with 69 percent by Mr. Abrams six years ago.
Assemblyman Roberto Ramirez, the Bronx Democratic leader who helped organize efforts to spur a Hispanic vote, said there were higher turnouts in several neighborhoods with large numbers of Hispanic residents, like the Lower East Side, East Harlem and Hunts Point.
Mr. D'Amato also had to be disappointed with his performance with Jewish voters, a constituency with whom he has always done well, even when running against Jewish candidates. A strong supporter of Israel who was quick to condemn the 1991 rioting in Crown Heights, Mr. D'Amato was involved in a well-publicized push this year to force Swiss banks to return money to the families of victims of the Holocaust. But the Senator received only 23 percent of the vote, an 18-point drop from 1992.
Mr. Miringoff said polling data indicated that Mr. D'Amato's support collapsed several weeks ago when he used a vulgar Yiddish term to refer to Mr. Schumer.