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Opinion
Political Divide? Upstate Vs. Down Or Cuomo Over All?

New York has always been an amalgam of two places — upstate and downstate. For years, the state was fairly evenly divided. The City, with all its subways and airports and tens of thousands of cops, had tremendous needs and upstate, well, not so much. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why they made Albany the capital, as a sort of halfway point, somewhat like the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; a place to bring the two sides together. We have to remember, of course, that Long Island has honorary membership in the upstate collaboration, even though much of the Island uses the facilities and services of the metropolitan area, all the while hating much of what they see in the City.

Part of the history between upstate and downstate is that the City traditionally elects Democrats and upstate elects Republicans. While the State of New York has gotten more and more "blue," electing more and more Democrats, a number of things have happened that keep the Republicans in upstate New York in power.

One of these is that, in the most undemocratic process of all, we have allowed the Republicans who are in control of the majority in the state Senate to draw their own districts, giving them a tremendous advantage in winning and keeping these seats. We send our kids to wars to "fight for democracy" but this is nothing short of disgraceful and we all know it. A second thing that keeps the Republicans in power is that Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, wants them in power, perhaps because he thinks that if the Democrats take both houses of the Legislature, they will bust the budget. So, Cuomo has been instrumental in keeping the Republicans in power in the Senate. In fact, we all know that he says one thing but does another.

For his part, Cuomo seems to assume that he can continue getting away with saying that he wants Democrats in the Senate while doing everything to prevent that from actually happening. The problem for Cuomo and for the Senate Republicans is that the state keeps getting bluer, even upstate. We saw what happened when Obama ran the second time. Minority groups came out to vote because of Obama but stayed around to vote for other Democrats "down ticket." Conversely, when there was no presidential election, the Republicans won their hand-drawn Senate seats big time. So, it remains to be seen whether the Hudson River (estuary) type surge will continue in the next election where it looks like Hillary Clinton will certainly do well in New York. That might be especially so if Donald Trump accomplishes the unthinkable and becomes the Republican candidate.

We all know how unhappy the Hispanic community is about Trump and his intemperate remarks about Mexicans, calling them all kinds of names. Of course, minority turnout in the Obama elections should probably teach the Democrats a lesson about who should be on the national ticket. My own favorite is Deval Patrick, perhaps the best governor in the history of Massachusetts. He keeps telling us that he is not interested but one can only assume you don't say yes to going to the dance until you're asked.

In any case, the question for Cuomo is whether his assumption that he can say that he wants a Democratic state Senate while simultaneously working against it will continue to fool the people, who he has to believe know nothing about state politics and really don't want to. He is assisted in this strategy by a group of self-serving Democratic state Senators who have broken away from the regular Democrats to make common cause with the Republicans. In fact, many of us believe that this group of Democratic "traitors" has gotten away with their perfidy because Cuomo is either encouraging it or looking the other way.



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