June 9, 2006
Those Were the Days Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:20 AM EST Josh Zeitz is right that New York State has tumbled quite far from the unquestioned preeminence it once held in presidential politics. Consider this: From 1800, the first contested presidential election, through 1948, a total of 38 presidential elections were held. In all but nine of these, the presidential candidate or his running mate on at least one of the two major-party tickets was from New York. (See notes 1 and 2 below.)
As Josh notes, candidates have gone to great lengths to win New York. In the spring of 1800 Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s main lieutenant in New York City, put together a dream team of assembly candidates in that year’s local elections (the state legislature chose presidential electors in those days). George Clinton, a 60-year-old once and future governor and later Vice-President, who had retired to a farm upstate and whose wife had recently died, had his arm repeatedly twisted by Burr until he reluctantly agreed to run. Clinton stipulated that he would not be required to do any campaigning or express support for Jefferson, and that he would be free to state that his name had been put on the list without his permission.
Another celebrity candidate on Burr’s all-star slate was 71-year-old Horatio Gates, the Revolutionary War general, making his only foray into politics. Others included a former member of George Washington’s cabinet, a prominent lawyer who six years later would be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the city’s largest landowner—all of whom Burr got to pretend that they wanted nothing more out of life than to spend a winter in Albany. After assembling the slate, Burr tirelessly raised funds and organized campaign activities. The result: Burr’s slate won the city election, thus giving control of the state legislature to Jefferson’s supporters, and thus essentially deciding the presidential election (New York was one of the few states where the outcome was in doubt). In return for these exertions, Jefferson made Burr his running mate (and look what happened—but that’s another story, or several stories).
Another example came in 1888. The presidential race between Benjamin Harrison and the incumbent Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was looking very tight, with New York and Indiana the main battlegrounds. Massive vote-buying and fraud won New York for Harrison by a margin of about 15,000 and swung the electoral vote his way, though Cleveland took the nationwide popular vote by nearly 100,000.
But that’s all in the past. In the 14 elections since 1948, no New Yorker has won a major-party nomination for President (see note 3; this streak will probably be broken soon), and only three for Vice-President, all losers: William Miller in 1964, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and Jack Kemp in 1996. The explanation? In the mid-1960s California passed New York as the nation’s largest state; now Texas has passed it too, and soon Florida will as well. Moreover, as a result of various demographic and political trends, New York is hardly ever “in play” in any close election. So the days when the Empire State stood like a colossus over presidential elections are gone for good.
As a lifelong New Yorker, I heartily deplore this trend and wish the Sunbelt had stuck to growing oranges and continued to let us run things. Unfortunately, however, the Sunbelt does not seem inclined to listen to me. It’s a sad state of affairs, but as John Steele Gordon points out, there is a silver lining: We can watch television in a leap-year autumn in peace, free from fear that our pleasure will be interrupted with a cacophonous barrage of presidential campaign ads.
NOTES
(1) This enumeration does not include Gen. George B. McClellan, Lincoln’s opponent in 1864, who lived in New York City for a year or so around the time of the election but was basically a nomad. You can change it to “all but eight” if you’re a stickler.
(2) The idea of a “major party” has broken down from time to time, but never in a way that would affect the statistics in this article.
(3) This enumeration does not include Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1952 was officially a New York resident (and president of Columbia University, though he had been on leave since 1950), or Richard Nixon, who in 1968 lived in New York City, where he was a partner in a law firm. You could make a case for Nixon as a New Yorker, since he had lived in New York for nearly six years at the time of the election, but he is so strongly associated with California that it would seem strange.
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