Robert Hornak
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail. com and @roberthornak on X.
It can be hard to tell sometimes, but New York has always been a swing state. Republicans looking at next years race for Governor are hoping it still is.
There has been a general belief that the demographics of New York have changed too drastically and against Republicans that the state is now and will remain a blue state. That NYC has become dominated by immigrant voters who can not relate to the issues that Republicans believe in.
But history, if it offers any guide, would indicate otherwise.
How states vote for president is often considered a bell weather for how the state votes more locally. And while it’s true that the last Republican president that New York voted for was Ronald Reagan, before that there was a long history of support for Republican presidents.
In fact, since the founding of the GOP, NY voted for Republican presidents 20 times between 1856 and 1984, while only voting for the Democrat 13 times in that same period. That included 8 out of 9 times for the Republican from 1896 to 1928. The shift started with FDR in 1932, which also coincides with the fall of Tammany Hall, the powerful but corrupt Democratic political machine that ruled Manhattan for over a century.
Tammany gave rise to many famous, and sometimes notorious, public figures including Martin Van Buren, Jimmy Walker, Robert Wag ner and Al Smith. But there was the inevitable reaction to Tammany from within the party, giving birth to a strong reform movement and the success of anti-Tammany reformers like Samuel J. Tilden, Grover Cleveland, FDR, and Ed Koch.
But as times changed and new immigrant groups came to NYC, the base that Tammany represented – mostly Irish immigrants who came to NYC in large numbers during this time – started to move toward the GOP. Other white ethnic and predominantly catholic voters also started to find a home with the GOP.
As time went on, neighborhoods dominated by Irish, Italian, German and Polish voters became fertile ground for the GOP, while the Democrats took advantage of the shift of Black voters away from the GOP while following the Tammany model of recruiting the newest immigrants, Hispanic and Asian immigrants in particular.
It wasn’t that long ago that Republicans had State Senators serving in every borough. But one by one they fell, losing Roy Goodman in Manhattan in 2002, Guy Velella in the Bronx in 2004, in Queens Serf Maltese in 2008 and Frank Padavan in 2010, and Marty Golden in Brooklyn in 2018. Only Staten Island, an indisputably red county, still has a republican serving in the state senate.
The math is simple, if you can’t win the most local elections, the chances that you can win the city- wide and statewide races are slim.
But recently there are signs that the dynamics are shifting in favor of the GOP. The republican conference in the City Council recently doubled from three to six. Republicans picked up a few State Assembly seats in south Brooklyn, including two districts heavily dominated by Chinese voters. In 2009, Republicans in Queens won the Flushing City Council seat, but infighting in the party drove Peter Koo to leave the GOP and become a Democrat before his reelection in 2013. This district, however, remains one where Republicans have performed well in recent elections.
As Democrats are once again taking many of their base voters for granted, the GOP is, slowly, capitalizing on the growing disenchantment. And with the expected election of socialist Zohran Mamdani for mayor, a Muslim who is strongly opposed to Israel and who has been accused of antisemitism, the disenchantment is expected to grow within the Jewish community and with Asians who put a high priority on educational excellence and free market capitalism. This could manifest in an earth- shattering realignment next year in the race for Governor, and the other statewide seats as well, while sweep- ing more Republicans into the state legislature. Anyone who doesn’t think this is possible needs to reex- amine the political history of New York, which proves the old adage, the only constant is change.
