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.
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