Hopefully this "Jewish contributors list" thing will hurt the rat. The last GOP seat in the city besides the Staten Island one was the silk stocking seat, lost by the incumbent Bill Green after redistricting in 1992 to Carolyn Maloney. The leftward movement in the area plus the fact that it now has a rat chunk of Queens in it renders it unwinnable (or at least all but unwinnable, it would take an ideal scenario to maybe elect a liberal RINO to the seat). For GOP seats in the city besides those two you have to go back to the 50's I think. DJ would know.
Currently the second most GOP seat in the city at least going by POTUS voting is A. Weiner's 9th district. Weiner hasn't had a GOP foe since 2004. It gave Bush 30% in 2000 but 44% in 2004, which McCain matched. You could probably draw a seat Bush/McCain won from white areas of Brooklyn and Queens. But capturing that hypothetical seat wouldn't be a slam dunk.
If Weiner had been elected Mayor I would have liked to have seen what effort if any would have been put into the special election for the seat. Weiner has an opponent this time, we'll see if he can make it a race, I would hope so but definitely wouldn't bet on it.
It was 1981-1983 when we last had three. Bill Green in the Silk Stocking district (now Maloney’s seat) and the two Reagan landslide freshmen, Guy Molinari from Staten Island and John LeBoutillier from Eastern Queens/West Nassau. We almost had a 4th member when our candidate nearly beat Leo Zeferetti in SW Brooklyn (Molinari was redistricted in with Zeferetti in 1982 and to the Dems chagrin, beat Zeferetti). When LeBoutillier’s 6th was combined with the Nassau-based 3rd, he ran in it instead and lost to Dem Bob Mrazek (which is technically Peter King’s seat now).
Essentially goes like this, the last Republican to represent each borough:
Manhattan — Bill Green (defeated 1992)
Brooklyn — Vito Fossella (retired 2009)
Staten Island — Fossella (””””””” “”””)
Queens — John LeBoutillier (1981-1983)
Bronx — Paul Fino (resigned in 1968)
And as an aside, the last time the GOP won a majority of the NYC delegation was in 1920.
The Brooklyn portion of Nadler’s ultraliberal NY-08, which casts 29% of the CD’s votes, has a huge Orthodox Jewish amd Russian Jewish population and it gave McCain 55% in 2008 (it had also voted for Bush in 2004). The Brooklyn portion of Weiner’s NY-09 also has many Orthodox Jews and it gave McCain 57% in 2008 (and a similar percentage to Bush in 2004). Combining Orthodox Jewish parts of Brooklyn into a single district (one would have to append Williamsburg to those areas in the south through a fairly narrow land bridge) would yield a conservative-voting district that would be highly competitive between a Jewish conservative Republican and a Jewish conservative Democrat.
There are plenty of GOP neighbirhoods in Weiner’s Queens portion, andit may be possible to create a GOP CD in Queens (think Serphin Maltese’s old state senate district).
I would combine white parts of Manhattan—basically the Nanhattan portions of Nadler’s and Maloney’s CDs—into a single district. Had that been done in 1992 Green would have probably survived (especially following Weiss’s death), although nowadays I don’t think even a RINO could win it.
And forget about the Bronx. It ain’t happening. We could take parts of Engel’s CD in Westchester and Rockland and combine it with areas to the northto form a GOP CD, but the Bronx is unwinnable for the GOP for the foreseeable future.