“If I can make it there, I can make it anywhere.” So go the lyrics in the Kander/Ebb song New York, New York, most famously sung by Frank Sinatra. Sinatra, who grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson, made it in New York and everywhere as well.
Not making it, however, are those of the two dozen Democratic presidential candidates from metropolitan New York. As my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York points out, many of the candidates who will appear in this week’s CNN debates in Detroit will not qualify for further debates under the Democratic National Committee’s rules.
The requirements are that candidates get 2% in recent national polls or in the four early-voting states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada — which together have 4% of the nation’s population. In the current RealClearPolitics average of recent polls, the New York-area candidates are not meeting that standard. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey is at 1.5%, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is at 0.7%, and Sen. Kirsten Gilliibrand of New York is at 0.5%.
Once upon a time, candidates from New York (and from New Jersey, too — think Woodrow Wilson) were prime presidential contenders. For much of the 20th century, more than 10% of Americans lived in metropolitan New York. In the 1944 general election, 7% of all U.S. votes were cast in the five boroughs of New York City. During almost all the time that New York was the nation’s most populous state, from the 1820 census until 1963, New York, with the nation’s largest number of electoral votes, was politically mainstream, voting not much different from the nation as a whole. And of course, New York was the center of national media, the headquarters of almost all major financial institutions and more business corporations than any other city.
In the years since the Civil War, New York produced more serious presidential candidates than any other state: Horatio Seymour, Horace Greeley, Ulysses S. Grant (looking for a comeback in 1880 when he lived in Manhattan), Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Alton Parker (TR’s 1904 Democratic opponent), Charles Evans Hughes, Franklin Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie, Thomas E. Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower (president of Columbia University before he ran in 1952), Averell Harriman, and Nelson Rockefeller.
After that, the list thins out. Gov. Mario Cuomo decided in 1992, as a plane chartered to fly to New Hampshire idled on the Albany runway, not to run. His son, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, didn’t come that close to running this time, and the governor who defeated the elder Cuomo in 1994, George Pataki, made no impact when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2015.
New York’s senior senator, Charles Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, has hot run and won’t. The junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, chosen by interim Governor David Paterson to fill Hillary Clinton’s seat, is hobbled this year by her obviously insincere switch from conservative upstate representative to left-wing statewide senator. Cory Booker, something of a celebrity when he was mayor of Newark, and a familiar figure in Manhattan, has a much milder version of the same problem (compare his speech to the 2016 national convention with his recent leftish rhetoric). As for de Blasio, nearing the end of his second term, most New Yorkers just seem happy that he cannot seek a third.
The problem for New York-based candidates is that New York is not as large nor as representative of the nation as it was in midcentury America. Since the 1960 election, the state has been voting more Democratic than the national average, very much more Democratic over the last 25 years. It’s been long time since it’s been a target state. And its population hasn’t grown much. It had 47 electoral votes in that 1944 election, when New York City cast 1 of every 14 votes and the two competitors had residences a few blocks from each other (Thomas Dewey had an apartment on East 71st Street and Franklin Roosevelt had inherited his mother’s townhouse on East 65th Street). Now it’s the fourth most populous state, after California, Texas, and Florida, with 29 electoral votes, likely to go down to 27 after the 2020 census.
Of course, there is one New Yorker who has done quite well politically: the range-haired guy in the White House. But that’s not because of support from his hometown voters. In the 2016 Republican primary, Donald Trump lost New York County (Manhattan) to John Kasich. (It was one of only seven counties Kasich carried outside his home state of Ohio; four were small counties in Vermont and two were home to big universities in Michigan.) In November, Trump won 37% of the votes in New York, more than Republican nominees did in 5 of the 6 previous elections. As he did nationally, he seems to have done better than previous Republicans among non-college whites, while running behind them among white college graduates; he carried upstate New York, narrowly, and Suffolk County, the eastern half geographically of Long Island, but he ran worse than other Republicans in Manhattan, Westchester County and, in upstate, Tompkins County (home of Cornell University).
I suppose you can say that Trump is an example of “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” But only if by “make it there” you mean making yourself a national celebrity and if by “make it anywhere” you mean appealing to people as the opponent of the politics of the place you call home.
