Democrats can't take reliably blue New York for granted in the November election, especially if native New Yorker Donald Trump gets the Republican nomination,
The Hill reports.
With 29 electoral college votes, the Empire State hasn’t gone for a Republican since Ronald Reagan's reelection bid in 1984, but Trump, a high-profile New York real estate mogul, could repeat the feat, according to Anthony Scaramucci, a Wall Street financier and establishment Republican donor.
"You can’t say he has no chance of winning New York" he tells The Hill. "You can’t underestimate his appeal in the blue-collar community… and he has a heat-seeking laser to find out your personal weaknesses. Whatever you were worried about in middle school, as a kid, and that you’ve carried on into adulthood, he knows what it is and he’ll bring it out."
The Blaze columnist Wayne Root agrees.
"Trump is a New York hero in those working-class boroughs,”
Root wrote in December.
“And if he [wins], Hillary’s goose is cooked. If the GOP wins New York, Democrats have no electoral path to the White House."
Trump's road to the White House won't be easy, however.
"As of now we don’t have much evidence that Trump is overwhelmingly changing this calculus in New York," Adam Seth Levine, an assistant professor of political science at Cornell University, tells The Hill.
“Given how well-known these two candidates are, we don’t have a ton of reasons to expect these numbers to change a lot. Even if Trump managed to swing the 9 percent of undecided folks … to his side, that still wouldn’t be enough to win."
Trump campaigns on the idea he's the “anti-politician, and that he is plain spoken and unvarnished," but "it’s just the intense blueness of the state” that's hard to overcome, Grant Reeher of Syracuse University tells The Hill.
Trump and Clinton claim they hail from New York, but Reeher notes: "New Yorkers don’t get hung up on that sort of thing."
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