With convention approaching, New York GOP hopes Donald Trump nomination boosts local candidates

For New York Republicans, the presumed nomination of Donald Trump for president brings an end to a long drought when it comes to having a New Yorker at the top of the ticket.

The party’s last nominee to run as a New Yorker was Richard Nixon, who moved to New York City after losing the race for governor of California, in 1968. Before that, it was General Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952, who registered to vote using his address at 60 Morningside Drive in Manhattan, where he lived while he was president of Columbia University.

Since then the state’s political clout has waned as the nation’s population shifted south and west. New York went from having 43 House seats, the most of any state, to just 27 today. Now it is tied for third place with Florida, behind California and Texas.

New York Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox told City & State that Trump’s candidacy has been a game changer for the state GOP by boosting its profile and attracting an army of new voters.

Trump won the New York primary with well over half a million votes, compared with the 118,000 votes Mitt Romney garnered in 2012.

“Trump is helping us just about everywhere in the state,” Cox said. “Trump says we will win New York, but I tell him first let’s nail down Pennsylvania.”

Cox attributes Trump’s appeal to his ability to tap into the anxiety of millions of voters “who no longer believe that their children will do better, or even as well as they did. They yearn for that feeling they once had that as Americans they were part of something bigger than just themselves.”

The state GOP needs Trump’s boost, Cox said, because New York is a major battleground for the House of Representatives. Four of the state’s congressional seats now held by Republicans are considered tossups. “So that means four of the 20 most at-risk seats for the nation as a whole are here in our state,” he said.

First-term Republican Reps. Lee Zeldin (1st Congressional District), Elise Stefanik (21st) and John Katko (24th) are all considered vulnerable. Rep. Richard Hanna from the 22nd Congressional District, who was first elected in 2010, is retiring.

Cox believes the Trump factor boosts his party’s chances to make inroads in places like the 3rd Congressional District, which includes Nassau, Queens and Suffolk counties, where Rep. Steve Israel is retiring, as well as hold on to outgoing Rep. Chris Gibson's seat in the 19th district.

“Having our presidential nominee come from our state is really helping energize us,” said Courtney Canfield Greene, who chairs the Orange County Republican Party. Greene said she thinks Trump could help her party retake the 18th Congressional District, which it lost to Sean Patrick Maloney, a former aide to President Bill Clinton and New York’s first openly gay member of Congress.

The latest Quinnipiac University Poll, which showed a dramatic shift of voter sentiment toward Trump in Florida and Pennsylvania, recently has some Trump’s New York boosters swinging for the fences.

“I can see a real pathway for Trump to take New York,” said Adele Malpass, chairwoman of the Manhattan Republican Committee.

“Rob Astorino ran against Gov. Cuomo and won 42 of the 46 upstate counties, even though he was massively outspent by Cuomo,” she said. “Add in Staten Island, Buffalo, Erie and Suffolk, which Trump will carry, and you’re right there. Of course, at the same time, you have to break the 25 percent threshold in the other four city boroughs.”

Doug Muzzio, professor of political science at Baruch College, said it’s tough to determine with any precision the number of new voters Trump has pulled into the process. But Muzzio says he does think Trump voters are being undercounted by pollsters.

“It is just like with the Brexit polling when people could have been reluctant to tell pollsters they were voting to leave (the European Union),” Muzzio said, “because that perspective was developing such a social stigma.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified New York's last Republican presidential nominee.