Is there any chance - even a longshot chance - that we can dump NYC? Rob Astorino won in UPSTATE NY last time. They say we need NYC for financial reasons, but to that I say a conservative governor would give us lower taxes. Plus, NYC can keep it’s $$, and UPSTATE can keep it’s conservative principles.
My apologies to the conservatives who live in NYC, including my in-laws.
Trump came within a hair of carrying Upstate.
I’m a huge advocate of conservative areas separating from the political hellholes that bring them down. Upstate NY, Inland Cali, my own Illinois outside of 1 county (where I live). The Rest of Illinois vote for Trump, Romney, and W Bush twice.
It don’t see it ever happening without major civil unrest. You can’t ask for freedom, you need to demand it.
Things will have to get pretty bad before decent citizens get ornery enough to take to the streets and stop tolerating big city democrats swine getting to waste their tax dollars.
Even if state politicians, and voters both Upstate and in metro NYC, agreed with splitting up the state, you’d run into a couple of geographic problems. First, it would be very dificult for GOP-leaning Staten Island and Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island to be excluded for a state centered in NYC; perhaps Staten Island can join NJ and Long Island (sans Queens and Brooklyn) can join CT (with which it has a water boundary), but I don’t think that such areas could form part of a State of (Upstate) New York unless all concerned would be willing to have both an “East Pakistan” and a “Kaliningrad” situations.
Second, if we drew state boundaries for Upstate that ran all the way to the southern border of Westchester County, the new state still would be likelier than not to elect Democrats. One would need to excise Westchester as well in order to have a politically marginal state, and Democrats still might win due to voters in Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Ithaca and other urban areas.
The only way out of which I can think would be if a new, über-Democrat state was created that combined Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Westchester County with (i) Newark and some other heavily RAT areas in NJ and (ii) the heavily Dem suburbs in SW CT, plus Bridgeport and New Haven, which would leave remaining parts of NY, NJ and CT to form a state in which the GOP would be very competitive (particularly if we can send Hartford and New Britain to a new MA/RI/VT combo state and Camden, NJ to a new state that combines Philly and its RAT suburbs in PA with Wilmington, DE and Baltimore). But that would be far more difficult to pull off.