At the Economist, Lexington looks at the dearth of Republicans in New York City and muses why this might be:
How the Republicans found themselves in this wretched state dates back to the party’s founding 150 years ago, and reflects its virtues at least as much as its failures. The party was started with vital backing from a number of New Yorkers, including Horace Greeley, the editor of the Tribune; its creed was anti-slavery, and the city’s Republicans provided the crucial platform in 1860 for Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech at Cooper Union. “Let us have faith that right makes might,” intoned Lincoln, in words that would capture the heart of the nation. But not New York, at least back then. In the election that followed, Lincoln was trounced in the city by a Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas, who championed a more nuanced approach to slavery that let states set moral standards of their own. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was put into effect, declaring that “all persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free.” The signatories were Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward, a New York Republican. New Yorkers were not impressed by this, nor by a forced draft, and riots ensued.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries the city’s local politics were dominated by Tammany Hall, as the local Democratic organisation was known, which provided modest services for the poor in exchange for votes and at the cost of massive corruption. Typically, when Republican mayors have managed to come to power, it has been because their independence provides them with some credibility in promising reform and taming big government. [emphasis added]
Ah yes, New Yorkers are Democrats because at heart they’re pro-slavery and corrupt! Certainly, both phenomena that Lexington points out are significant. But simply isolating an origin is only half of a historical explanation; the other half is explaining why it continues to hold force. And what’s missing here is a big one: the New Deal/Great Society. Both in the general sense of providing for the welfare of the poor, but also in the specific sort of policies that deal with urban problems. Throughout the 20th century and continuing to today, the Democrats represent urban interests and the Republicans small-town interests (suburban and rural interests have been up for grabs). Whether the defunding of New York’s rat control during the Reagan years, the neglect of public transportation initiatives or the lopsided homeland security funding formulas of today (with Wyoming getting more per capita than New York), the policy differences can be quite concrete. Add on top of that the cultural disposition of a city of immigrants, artists, gays, the bohemian demimonde and the culture industry to feel it’s under attack from a party putting immigrants through Kafkaesque detention, defunding art, outlawing gay marriage, and trying to shore up its heartland credentials by sneering at things foreign (c.f. the email from the Bush campaign sneering at Kerry’s supposed fondness for Indian food.)
If only those Republicans weren’t so virtuous, New York would be voting for them in droves.
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