Donald Trump and the New York Republican Tradition

               From the inauguration of George Washington in 1789 until the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017, every President of the United States held at least one of five posts before assuming that office: a four-star general or the equivalent, the Vice President, the governor of a state, a member of Congress (usually a senator), or a Cabinet secretary.  It is tempting to view Donald Trump as a deus ex machina in American politics.  He is the first president never to have held any of the traditional posts before assuming the Presidency, he won the primaries of a party he had only recently joined over fervent opposition, and he won a convincing Electoral College majority while losing the popular vote.  His path to the White House is unprecedented, but he fits, with some variation, into a tradition dating back to the American founding: the New York Republican, a center-right take on the issues facing America’s largest and most globalized city.

Compared to mainstream Republicans, especially since the rise of the modern conservative movement, New York Republicans, and their Federalist ancestors, have been much more comfortable with government spending and intervention in the economy.  During the Founding, Alexander Hamilton advocated central banking, infrastructure spending, and government backing of industry as opposed to Thomas Jefferson's agrarian, small government policies.  Theodore Roosevelt championed national parks, trust-busting, and food safety laws, and left the GOP to form the Progressive Party when it refused to re-nominate him in 1912.  Nelson Rockefeller expanded New York's state university system as governor and led the faction of the midcentury GOP that wanted to reconcile itself to the New Deal's expansion of government.  While Donald Trump has championed tax cuts and deregulation, he has also abandoned entitlement reform, advocated increased infrastructure spending, and largely ignored the growing deficit since 2017 (admittedly, previous Republican administrations rarely went beyond lip service in cutting the deficit). 

New York Republicans practice a different form of social conservatism from Republicans elsewhere in the country, one focused more on law and order than on sexual mores.  In the early 1960s, Nelson Rockefeller divorced his wife, then married a woman who was herself divorced, which helped sink his 1964 presidential campaign; later, he signed the law legalizing abortion in New York.  Rudy Giuliani had a similar checkered marital history and pro-choice stance, and also signed New York City's law granting benefits to gay and lesbian partners of city employees.  However, on issues of order and security, President Trump's fervent denunciations of this summer's rioting are cut from the same cloth as Nelson Rockefeller's crackdown on the Attica prison riot, Rudy Giuliani's "broken windows" policing, and Chris Christie's debate with Rand Paul over post-9/11 security legislation. 

New York Republicans have usually been a minority in both their city and party.  Democratic machine politics in New York City date back to the 1830s, and the city leaned Democratic even before the New Deal when other large northern cities, such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and even sometimes Chicago and Detroit, were run by Republican machines.  (Upstate New York was solidly Republican, making the state as a whole a battleground.)  Since the New Deal, as cities around the country became increasingly Democratic, every borough except Staten Island consistently delivers supermajorities to federal and statewide Democratic candidates.  As for the Republican Party, New England and Midwestern interests called the shots within the GOP before World War II, and the South and rural areas throughout the country have become dominant since.  New York has produced seven presidents (Martin van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, both Roosevelts, and Donald Trump*), but Trump is the first non-Democrat to attain the office in his own right, rather than as a vice president after the sitting president's death.  Prior to Trump, New York Republicans seemed on an irreversible downhill slide: Thomas Dewey was famously upset in the 1948 general election, Nelson Rockefeller came up short of the nomination, and Rudy Giuliani could not win a single state in 2008.  

How was Donald Trump able to overcome this trend?  He broke from previous New York politicians and joined the Republican base on two crucial issues: abortion and foreign policy.  As mentioned before, Rudy Giuliani is pro-choice, as was Nelson Rockefeller.  Trump also took a pro-choice position when he was contemplating a Reform Party bid in 2000, but, whether out of conviction or expediency, has since fallen hard for the pro-life cause, from denouncing late-term abortion in graphic terms in the 2016 debates to pledging to appoint originalist judges, a pledge he has largely fulfilled.  While New York politicians of both parties have tended to be internationalist, Trump's criticisms of military involvement in the Middle East and free-trade policies neatly coincided with the Republican base's turn against such policies.  In both cases, it helped that Trump had never held public office before running for president, and so had no votes from the past to defend on either of these issues. 

From the beginning of the republic, center-right politics in New York have contrasted with center-right politics in the rest of the country, being more comfortable with government intervention, more suited to commercialism, and more concerned about law and order.  By compromising with the conservative base in other parts of the country on a few key issues, Donald Trump was able to win the Republican nomination and the White House, goals that had eluded previous generations of New York Republicans.  While it has never been dominant, the New York Republican tradition has been a part of our politics since the founding and will likely to continue to be a factor even after the Trump administration leaves office.

 

*Chester Arthur was born in Vermont, and Grover Cleveland was born in New Jersey, but both had their political careers in New York.

Joe Biden and Delaware's Business Democrats

The Indian River Bridge in Sussex County, Delaware.  Source: Wikipedia

           Delaware has been both a contrarian state and a bellwether. In the 1800s, it was a Federalist and Whig party stronghold while Jeffersonian Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats dominated the rest of the country. As the northeasternmost slave state, it had little appetite for secession, but enough Southern sympathy to be one of only three Union states to oppose Abraham Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. It remained predominantly Democratic in the decades after the Civil War, only going Republican for Ulysses Grant’s re-election in 1872, until William Jennings Bryan turned the Democrats’ focus to Western farmers, alienating a state increasingly focused on industrial Wilmington. Starting in 1896, Delaware began favoring the Republicans, culminating in its being one of only six states to vote to give Herbert Hoover a second term in 1932. After World War II, Delaware’s position between the Northeast and South and its blend of urban, suburban, and rural areas made it the quintessential swing state. After voting for Tom Dewey in 1948, it picked the winner in every Presidential election until it went for Al Gore in 2000, at the time the longest winning streak in the country.

Since then, Delaware- like its neighbors New Jersey and Maryland and most of New England- has been reliably Democratic. Democrats have held the governorship since 1993, both senate seats since 2001, both houses of the state legislature since 2009, and the state’s sole U.S. House seat since 2011. (From 1993-2011, the House seat was held by former Gov. Mike Castle, one of the most moderate Republicans in Congress, who infamously lost a primary for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat to Christine “I’m not a witch” O’Donnell, who lost the general election to Sen. Chris Coons.) Delaware has voted well to the left of the national popular vote in every Presidential election since the 1990s, with George W. Bush’s 45.74%-53.34% loss to John Kerry in 2004 the closest any Republican has come this century.

This transformation has been led by New Castle County, the northernmost of the state’s three counties, which contains the city of Wilmington and roughly three-fifths of the state’s population. From 1936 to 1996, it voted for the winner in every Presidential election, usually by a margin close to the national popular vote (one notable exception was 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the county over Jimmy Carter by a single vote). Since then, like urban and inner suburban counties elsewhere in the Northeast (and, increasingly, in the rest of the country), New Castle County has become a Democratic stronghold. In every presidential election since 2004, the Democratic candidate carried it with at least sixty percent of the vote, and Donald Trump received less than a third of the New Castle County vote in 2016 even while he carried both of Delaware’s other counties.

With these trends, Delaware might be expected to be a fertile ground for left-wing politics. However, its politics have been marked by centrism, driven by the state’s large business community, and consensus, as might be expected in a small state (99 million Americans live in counties with a larger population than that of Delaware) where most high-level politicians know each other personally. Joe Biden’s Senate career began as a botched attempt at consensus among the state’s Republicans. In 1972, Sen. J. Caleb Boggs wanted to retire, but President Nixon and the state GOP feared a divisive primary between U.S. Rep. Pete du Pont (a future governor and presidential candidate) and Wilmington Mayor Harry Haskell. Boggs ran a reluctant and lackluster campaign, allowing Biden to pull the upset that November. Twenty years later, when the aforementioned Mike Castle was term-limited as governor, he arranged to seek the seat of Democrat Tom Carper, then the state’s lone U.S. Representative, who in turn ran for governor; despite being from different parties, both won their new offices handily.                                                                                                                

The biggest factor driving the relative centrism of Delaware Democrats is the state's business community. Thanks to a history of corporate-friendly laws and a favorable tax climate, Delaware has sixty percent of the Fortune 500 and almost ninety percent of the nation's initial public openings. Delaware has more LLCs than people. The state government gets more than one quarter of its revenue from corporate taxes, giving politicians of any stripe a strong incentive not to alienate the state's business community. This may reinforce the Democratic party's dominance at the state level, as Delaware has been immune from the recent trend of deep blue states electing Republican governors as a check on Democratic state legislatures (for example, the GOP has won five of the last seven elections for governor of Massachusetts and three of the last five for governor of Maryland). While every other Northeastern state (all six New England states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland) has elected a Republican governor at least once since the turn of the millennium, Democrats have won the last seven elections for governor of Delaware, all but one with more than fifty-eight percent of the vote.

One episode in Joe Biden’s career that illustrates Delaware’s business community’s influence on its politics is his sponsorship of the 2005 bankruptcy bill. The bill, supported by the credit-card companies, generally tightened standards in filing for bankruptcy, particularly by limiting the amount of money filers could claim as a homestead exemption and prohibiting discharging most student loans in bankruptcy. This bill passed with mostly Republican support and was opposed by many more liberal Democrats (including Elizabeth Warren, then a professor at Harvard), and even President Clinton during the 1990s. More recently, centrist Democratic Sen. Tom Carper attracted a progressive primary challenger, Kerri Evelyn Harris, in 2018. Carper won by a two-to-one margin, but it was the closest primary he had in over forty years in office (as state treasurer, congressman, and governor before being elected to the Senate). In 2020, Sen. Chris Coons fared better, getting over seventy percent against Jessica Scarane, another progressive challenger, in the primary.

The most prominent Delaware Democrat is Joe Biden, the party’s nominee at a time of division between its centrist, pro-business wing and its leftist wing. If he loses, the left wing will likely take it as a sign centrist policies cannot win a national election; if he wins, he will have to find a way to bridge this division within his own party. The moderate Delaware Democratic tradition is taking center stage at a time when its principles are increasingly questioned within the party, and how Delaware’s most prominent politician handles this dispute will shape Democratic politics for years to come.

Why Bernie Sanders Failed Where Donald Trump Succeeded

For a couple weeks in February, it seemed as if history would repeat itself. An insurgent candidate with a healthy dose of self-confidence and an easily caricatured outer-borough accent was poised to capture the presidential nomination of a party he did not particularly care for and whose establishment disdained him. Bernie Sanders had won (by some measures) Iowa, repeated his 2016 win in New Hampshire, and swept Nevada. On the last day of February, though, Joe Biden, whose best showing until then was a second-place finish with less than a fifth of the vote in Nevada, swept South Carolina. Within a week, the dynamics of the race flipped as most of the non-Sanders candidates dropped out and gave their support to Biden, who took states (such as Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Washington) where he had not been expected to be competitive. So how did Bernie Sanders fail where Donald Trump had succeeded four years earlier? 

On the surface, Bernie Sanders did better in the first three primaries than he did in 2016. He repeated his near-miss in Iowa (Sanders won more votes, but Pete Buttigieg won more county delegate equivalents) and win in New Hampshire, and flipped Nevada, which Hillary Clinton won in 2016. However, since more than two candidates were running this time, these results masked a decline in Sanders's percentage of the vote: from 49.6% to twenty-six percent in Iowa, from sixty percent to twenty-five percent in New Hampshire, and from forty-seven percent to forty percent in Nevada. In hindsight, Bernie Sanders going from winning New Hampshire in a landslide against a former first lady, senator, and secretary of state to winning it in a squeaker against a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, should have raised alarms for his campaign. He was vulnerable to the consolidation of the non-Sanders vote behind a single candidate, which happened as February turned into March.

Donald Trump faced a similar weakness in 2016. Much of the Republican base was skeptical of him, and he did not win a majority of the vote in any state until his home state of New York voted in the second half of April. However, the Republicans’ rules gave Trump an advantage in collecting delegates. Even though Trump got less than a third of the vote in South Carolina, he won all of the state’s delegates by carrying all seven of its congressional districts, and even though he got only about forty-five percent of the vote in Florida, he won all of its delegates due to its winner-take-all status, a rule initially intended to help Jeb Bush. Suppose the 2016 Republicans had been using the Democrats' system, where every candidate who gets at least fifteen percent of the vote receives a proportionate share of delegates. In that case, Trump would have only gotten twenty-one of South Carolina's fifty delegates, with fifteen going to Marco Rubio and fourteen to Ted Cruz, and fifty of Florida's ninety-nine delegates, with Rubio getting thirty and Cruz nineteen. Donald Trump was able to amass a large number of delegates with less than half of the vote in early states, an option not available to Bernie Sanders. 

As the 2016 primaries went on, the candidate pool was reduced to John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump. Trump was able to triangulate between his two rivals in a way unavailable to Bernie Sanders. The moderate wing of the party was unwilling to throw its support behind Cruz, while the conservative wing was unwilling to back Kasich. Marco Rubio, who outpolled Kasich in most early primaries, might have been able to bridge the gap, but unlike Kasich, he was unable to win his own state. By contrast, Bernie Sanders is clearly at the left end of the Democratic ideological spectrum, making him unable to play the center of the party off against a more left-wing candidate. There was also a racial dimension; white voters skeptical of Sanders tended to split their votes between the centrists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and the liberal Elizabeth Warren, while black and Hispanic voters (first in diverse Clark County, Nevada, and then more dramatically in South Carolina) who were skeptical of Sanders backed Biden. Given the importance of minority voters to the Democrats, the party's choice for an alternative to Sanders was obvious.

 

A Disgruntled Republican Base

 

This leads to, perhaps, the most important reason Trump was able to win the Republican nomination as an insurgent while Sanders came up short: the Republican base was dissatisfied with its establishment in a way that the Democratic base wasn't. President Obama is wildly popular among Democrats, getting a ninety-one percent approval rating in the summer of 2020, a nostalgia that seemed to rub off on his old running mate. By contrast, although George W. Bush was personally popular, with eighty-eight percent favorability among Republicans in 2015, his brother Jeb had the highest disapproval rating of any major candidate among Republican voters (especially conservatives and younger voters) even before Trump entered the race. Further down the ballot, the discontent led to a number of primary challenges to Republican senators in 2014 (no senators lost, but then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was toppled in Virginia) and would lead to John Boehner being forced out as Speaker of the House later in 2015. In hindsight, Jeb Bush running and becoming (with Trump) the leading candidate in the polls through most of 2015 was a gift to Donald Trump; it allowed him to paint himself as an anti-establishment candidate in a way he might not have been able to against, for example, Scott Walker or Marco Rubio.  

While the Bernie Sanders campaign had some superficial similarities with the Donald Trump campaign, the differences between the two explain why Trump won the nomination and the Presidency while Sanders came up short. Sanders's early victories in 2020 were with a minority of the vote, leaving him vulnerable to the consolidation of the moderate vote under a single candidate, which turned out to be Joe Biden. Donald Trump also got less than fifty percent in the early primaries in 2016, but his opposition was split between the moderate John Kasich and the conservative Ted Cruz, and the winner-take-all system the Republicans used in many states in 2016 allowed Trump to amass a large lead with pluralities of the vote. Perhaps most importantly, the Democratic establishment in 2020 had two advantages the Republican establishment in 2016 did not: a base that wasn't disgruntled with the party and the knowledge that an insurgent really could capture the nomination, as Trump did the previous cycle.

(Election data from Dave Leip's Atlas of Presidential Elections)