Laura Reston is the managing editor of the New Republic, where she writes about American politics.

On August 9, 2004, just three weeks before the Republican National Convention was set to convene at Madison Square Garden and renominate President George W. Bush, New York magazine had a modest proposal for its namesake city: Secession from the United States. “In a country that grows ever redder, it is the bluest of blue cities in one of the bluest of blue states, with the eccentrics to match,” Jennifer Senior wrote. “Psychically, then, New York already seems headed out of the union—so why not go all the way?”

For much of late twentieth century, people in the heartland felt the same way about New York. It was the city of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle. A near-bankruptcy in 1975. Son of Sam. Bernie Goetz. The Central Park Five. Looting. Wilding. Crack. Squeegee men. 2,000 homicides a year. The city, Senior wrote in 2004, “has always felt like a nation apart.”


For decades, what we are witnessing in 2016 would have been unthinkable: Two New Yorkers running head to head for president of the United States. Hillary Clinton—a former New York senator who lives in Chappaqua and based her campaign in hipster Brooklyn—is competing against a fast-talking real estate mogul from Queens whose life is almost a parody of New York glitz and excess. Twenty years ago, Ted Cruz’s attempt to take down Donald Trump with a knock on “New York values” might have played well in the heartland. But this year it felt like an out-of-touch attempt to play to someone’s aging uncle.

What happened? In many ways America has changed, becoming more urban and polyglot; in that sense, New York now resembles the rest of the nation more than it used to. But something far more important happened as well, exactly 15 years ago. When the planes hit the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and as the nation grieved the thousands dead in lower Manhattan, New York City underwent a transformation, both on the ground and in American eyes.

It was no longer the freewheeling, vaguely foreign island that conservatives had vilified for decades. It was the symbol of America that enemies had chosen to attack. In its response, it became the home of American heroism and resilience, of first-responders and men and women caked in dust and ash. This is one of the underappreciated changes wrought by the tragedy: On that moment 15 years ago, New York City became part of America again. And it paved the way for a future that nobody would have imagined, in which New Yorkers weren’t just competing in national politics, but would win the White House, regardless of which major political party proves victorious in November.

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Since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in Manhattan to announce he was running for president, Donald Trump has embraced his New York roots. Queens, the borough where he was raised, has stayed with him—the macho swagger, the aggression, the tabloid newspaper sensibilities, the lunch-pail conservatism. And as he’s barnstormed across the nation, he has stayed firmly identified with New York. Whenever possible, he even leaves the campaign trail to fly back to New York so he can sleep at home, in his penthouse overlooking Central Park, rather than staying overnight in some Iowa fleabag.

As flashy as the neon facades in Times Square, Trump wears his association with New York City with pride—and has for quite some time. On the debut episode of The Apprentice in 2004, he waxed poetic about the city, borrowing some of its sheen for his comeback attempt. “New York,” he said in a voiceover. “My city. Where the wheels of the global economy never stop turning. A concrete metropolis of unparalleled strength and purpose that drives the business world. Manhattan is a tough place. This island is the real jungle.” He hawks the city as if he wants to adopt every stereotype about New Yorkers out there, casting himself as the city’s personification.

Similarly, Hillary Clinton—a New Yorker by choice, not by birth—has made little effort to play down her own New York connections. She still lives in Chappaqua, a tony Manhattan suburb, and summers in the Hamptons, rubbing shoulders with Wall Street financiers, trust funders, and celebrities. Her campaign is based out of Brooklyn. Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, keeps a fully staffed office in Harlem. Her daughter, Chelsea, lives in a block-long condo in the Flatiron district.

It wasn’t always like this. In 1940, another Republican presidential nominee understood that being from Manhattan could be a liability on the campaign trail. Wendell Willkie was the wealthy president of a large electric company based in New York and lived in a lavish mansion on Fifth Avenue. Years earlier, he had begun a very public affair with a renowned New York book editor. Until 1939, the year before he announced he would run for president, he was a registered Democrat.

The parallels to Donald Trump—another businessman from New York and former registered Democrat whose marital infidelities were splashed across Page Six in the 1990s— are obvious and unmistakable. Both Willkie and Trump have lived out the traits that those in the heartland long associated with Manhattan: loose morals, liberal values and ostentatious wealth.

But whereas Trump has doubled-down on his New York identity, Wendell Willkie made a different play in 1940, toning down his New York lifestyle to compete in national politics. According to Bruce Dearstyne, author of The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State's History, Willkie refashioned himself as a humble Midwesterner, traveling to his childhood home in Rushville, Indiana, to accept the Republican nomination. The makeover was of little use: His attempt to transform himself from glitzy New York tycoon to grass-roots Indianan fell flat. Alice Roosevelt Longworth—herself the daughter of a president and wife of a speaker of the House—quipped that Willkie came “from the grass-roots of 10,000 country clubs.”

After Willkie lost to FDR in 1940, the Republicans nominated another moderate New Yorker, Thomas Dewey, in the presidential races of 1944 and 1948. Twice more, they lost the national election. An aversion for New York City—that place so out of touch with the conservative morals of the GOP base—would eventually become enshrined in the Republican playbook. “We could tell New York to kiss our ass and we could really start a conservative party,” said Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in 1960. Four years later, he would beat out Nelson Rockefeller—a mainline conservative from New York City who proudly called himself a “liberal Republican”—for the GOP presidential nomination.

Republicans increasingly took to framing American politics as a struggle that pitted conservatives in the heartland against liberal urban elites who believed in gun control, abortion, rights for gays, and the separation of church and state. “Their aim,” Thomas Frank wrote in his 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas, “was simply to bolster the stereotypes using whatever tools were at hand: to cast the Democrats as the party of a wealthy, pampered, arrogant elite that lives as far as it can from real Americans; and to represent Republicanism as the faith of the hardworking common people of the heartland, an expression of their unpretentious, all-American ways just like country music and NASCAR.”

New York was bound up in this, vilified as a symbol for liberal values. “Historically, Americans from the heartland have always had this paradoxical relationship with New York City,” said Andrew Hartman, the author of A War for the Soul of America, in an interview with Politico Magazine. “It’s the quintessential American city, but for religious conservatives, it’s all that’s wrong with the United States, American culture, in terms of its cosmopolitanism, its secularism.”

Through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, national politicians in both parties studiously cultivated a downhome, rural patina. Blue-blooded George H.W. Bush—a Connecticut senator’s son who graduated from Yale and lived for a time in the lavish apartment in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel reserved for the American ambassador to the United Nations—recast himself as a Texan and doubled down on cultural traditionalism. And while Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, his campaign routed a bus tour through as many back roads and small towns in the South as possible, showcasing the candidate in rural America, away from cosmopolitan cities like New York. Though he was officially nominated at the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in 1992, the metropolis wasn’t always kind to him. Clinton would have several major confrontations with hecklers and protesters that year, including several widely televised encounters with AIDS activists. New York—so far to the left that it clashed with the Democratic nominee.

During the 1990s—the era of Clinton and Giuliani—New York lost some of the grittier aspects that had long made it distasteful to the rest of the country. The streets were cleaned up. Crime rates fell. In the economic boom during President Bill Clinton’s second term, New York was prospering—it was territory so friendly that first lady Hillary Clinton chose to adopt New York citizenship and run for an open U.S. Senate seat in 2000.

The de facto readmission of New York into the union happened when the planes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. “There was a lot of sympathy for New York City, admiration for New York City,” says Dearstyne. “People realized it was special.” New York could no longer be treated like the plague; indeed, it was impossible to criticize or seem hostile toward it.

Suddenly, politicians on both sides of the aisle were incorporating haunting images of the rubble outside the World Trade Center into their campaign ads. In one spot from 2002, Senator Max Cleland of Georgia read a poem praising the city. In another ad two years later, the Bush campaign showed five firefighters lugging a stretcher draped in an American flag. The ad was controversial—Democrats claimed the Bush campaign was using September 11 for political gain—but it and others like it aired in 17 battleground states across the country, a daily reminder in the years after the September 11 attacks that New Yorkers had acted bravely. That year, the Republicans even held their convention in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, the first time the city had hosted an RNC since the party was founded 150 years earlier. “September 11 tilted the view away from this longstanding, late twentieth century trope about New York City being the hotbed of the devil and all the things that are wrong with the country,” Hartman says.

At the same time, the 9/11 attacks happened as longer shifts in the political landscape were manifesting—changes that made it easier for New York-based candidates to compete on a national level. Americans were increasingly moving to and living in cities. Meanwhile, Internet access and mass media chipped away at regional divisions, making the distinction between urban and rural America less contentious. “American political divisions have become much more nationalized,” says Dan Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s less important where a candidate is from. Instead, people care about what party they are from.” Meanwhile, public opinion shifted to the left on issues like gay marriage and gun control, pulling mainstream opinion more in line with New York socially, and making it harder for conservatives to suggest that Manhattan was at war with the American heartland.

That’s not to say that after September 11, social conservatives abandoned their habit of cordoning New York off from the heartland altogether (“Have you ever tried to order grits in a fancy Manhattan restaurant? Good luck,” Mike Huckabee wrote in his 2015 book God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy. “To borrow a phrase from the once senator and presidential candidate … there really are two Americas.”) And indeed, several New York politicians have tried to mount presidential campaigns since September 11 and failed—Rudy Giuliani, for example, never quite connected with voters in the American heartland in his 2008 bid to earn the GOP nomination. But what's important is that his being from New York was no longer debilitating; it no longer disqualified him right off the bat.

September 11 has aided Trump more palpably. When Ted Cruz accused him of having “New York values” during a presidential debate hosted by the Fox Business channel in January, Trump parried deftly, neutralizing the question in one fell swoop: “When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. Thousands of people killed and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup probably in the history of doing this. … I was down there. And I’ve never seen anything like it. And the people in New York fought and fought and fought. … We rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched, and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Fifteen years ago, before September 11, a presidential candidate would have had to answer the awkward question Cruz was trying to plant head on: If you grew up in New York City, in a life of luxury and comfort, going into bankruptcy four times, how can you understand the concerns of average Americans? Before September 11, would Trump have been able to deliver an answer satisfying enough to win over 40 percent of the Republican electorate? Maybe. But back then, it would've been a whole lot harder.

Clinton has tried to do employ the same argument that Trump used to swat away an opponent’s criticisms. Asked about her Wall Street contributors at a November 2015 debate in Iowa, she pivoted: “Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy, and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.” Her pivot was awkward—even tacky, some said—but the fact remained: September 11 helped neutralize concerns about her ties to New York.

Now, with less than two months left in the presidential race, New York continues to play an outsized role in the election. Both campaigns are based out of the city. Former mayor Rudy Giuliani is among Trump’s most active surrogates, while his successor, Michael Bloomberg, has endorsed Clinton and is making a major play in Senate and House races throughout the country. Come the morning of November 9, a New Yorker will likely be the president-elect of the United States.

As for the secession talk? That’s disappeared altogether—perhaps because the city now feels like it’s now more a part of the rest of the country than it was 20 years ago. Still, that 2004 New York magazine piece proved oddly prescient, even if its forecast was a bit off: After seceding, Senior wrote, “all that’d be left would be normalizing relations with the United States. Eventually we’d find that special someone, that perfect ambassador who both speaks the red-state language but still unambiguously represents New York. … I’m thinking the Donald.”