U.S. Senate
In 1946, when Democratic incumbent James M. Mead decided to run for Governor of New York, Ives successfully ran for his seat in the United States Senate. He faced former Governor Lehman in the general election, during which he became the first Republican to be endorsed by the New York American Federation of Labor. He eventually defeated Lehman by a margin of 52% to 47%. He was the first Republican to represent New York in the Senate since James W. Wadsworth, Jr., who was defeated for re-election in 1927.
Despite his moderate reputation, Ives supported the Taft–Hartley Act in 1947 and voted to override President Harry S. Truman's veto of the same; he subsequently lost his longstanding support from labor unions. He served as a delegate to the 1948 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which nominated his friend and fellow liberal New Yorker Thomas E. Dewey. That same year, he married his longtime secretary, Marion Mead Crain.
Ives was re-elected to a second term in 1952, defeating Brooklyn borough president John Cashmore by 55% to 36%. He received the largest number of votes hitherto ever won by a candidate in New York, carrying all but three of the state's sixty-two counties. A strong supporter of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, he served as a delegate to the 1952 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.
In 1954, Ives unsuccessfully ran to succeed Dewey as Governor of New York. In one of the closest gubernatorial elections in state history, he was narrowly defeated by Democrat W. Averell Harriman by 11,125 votes. He was a delegate to the 1956 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, California. In 1958, he co-sponsored a bill with Senator John F. Kennedy to correct abuses within organized labor as disclosed in hearings before the Rackets Committee.
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