Roger Lowenstein is the author of six books, including, last year, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve.

Donald Trump as the GOP front-runner has surprised in a lot of ways this election season. But it is his lead in New York that is particularly striking—dramatizing just how much the electorate’s mood has shifted in 2016.

America has often flirted with populist and xenophobic candidates. But until this year, candidates from New York—of either party—were the sort who would run against Donald Trump. They were socially liberal though often fiscally prudent, elitist rather than populist. Many had close ties to Wall Street and the foreign policy establishment. They were internationalists who favored more, not less, trade and overseas engagement.


The worldview of such candidates was shaped, as it were, by Ellis Island and by New York’s role as a center of commerce and finance. This was, in effect, New York’s contribution to the country—a projection of a liberal, outward reaching metropolis. It was how New York voters of both parties chose to see themselves—until this year. While Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic choice, approximates that ideal, Trump, who is presently leading in the polls among every Republican subgroup, would be a striking departure.

New Yorkers dominated presidential elections over much of American history. They served part or all of 11 terms in the White House, and were nominated 21 times, beginning with DeWitt Clinton, who narrowly lost to James Madison in 1812. In two elections—1904 and 1944—two New Yorkers were on the ballot. It could happen again. Both Trump and Clinton look to win in the home state primary of their respective party next week. If either is nominated, he or she would be the first New York nominee since Thomas Dewey in 1948.

It would be hard to overstate the contrast between Dewey, a Republican whose motto was “compassionate capitalism,” and Trump. Though mainly remembered for his inept ’48 campaign, when he was upset by Harry Truman, Dewey was a highly accomplished Republican governor who launched the state university system. In international affairs, Dewey embraced America’s postwar role as global policeman, supporting the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine.

Nelson Rockefeller, another liberal Republican governor, was also an emblematic New York contender (though he failed to capture the presidential nomination). His brother ran Chase Manhattan, a global financial giant, and his family bankrolled the Council on Foreign Relations, a pillar of postwar internationalism.

Even the state’s most recent Republican governor, George Pataki, who briefly ran for president this year, supported not only sending U.S. combat troops to the Middle East but also a path to legality for all immigrants. Even more liberal was New York City’s former Republican mayor, the almost-candidate Michael Bloomberg.

The New York moderates of the past were not strangers to the sort of intraparty struggle bedeviling the GOP now. Dewey, for instance, had to overcome a primary challenge by the isolationist Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft; Rockefeller was bested by the conservative Arizonan Barry Goldwater. But those battles followed a familiar pattern in which populists from the heartland courted voters resentful of East Coast elites. The difference today is that the populist, anti-establishment candidate is the New Yorker. And Trump, with his talk of fences and walls and his disdain for multilateral forums, is leading in his home state. It would appear that voter anger is warping the state’s identity.

Trump has variously denounced America’s allies and threatened to tear up America’s treaty obligations. He has said he would not be bothered to see the dissolution of NATO. Had his followers voted in 1916, they might have backed the Democratic incumbent, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson campaigned on the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” reflecting the desire of Middle America to stay out of the conflict in Europe. (Wilson, of course, was to become an internationalist himself. But that was later.) He was opposed by a former Republican New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes, a distinguished lawyer who argued for military “preparedness,” telegraphing the emerging establishment view that America should ally with Britain and shoulder greater responsibilities overseas. After World War II, this view was formalized in a series of alliances, under which America assumed international leadership and became the guarantor of world stability. Every subsequent secretary of state, including Hillary Clinton, saw their job as managing this American role.

Many New York presidential aspirants were wealthy, as Trump apparently is (he refuses to reveal his tax returns, so it’s hard to be sure). But his predecessors balanced personal fortune with a noblesse oblige commitment to the downtrodden. The Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt was a blue blood, but his compassion was genuine. I once heard Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the long-time Democratic New York senator, speak in Virginia, about New York’s traditional willingness to underwrite federal aid to less wealthy sections of the country. That, too, was part of New York—a sense of a prosperous community able to afford a measure of generosity. Trump has shown, rather than compassion, a disturbing penchant for attacking people’s weaknesses. He reduces every policy to a calculus of “wins” for one side and “losses” for the other, as though public policy were as binary as one of his casino games.

The contrast between Trump and Theodore Roosevelt, another New Yorker, is more nuanced. Teddy ruptured the Republican Party in 1912, when he ran on a third-party ticket. Like the real estate mogul, he at times railed against Wall Street. Teddy’s narcissism was at least mildly suggestive of Trump’s.

But the likeness stops there. Roosevelt was a lifelong public servant and naturalist who promoted national parks, not casinos. He never described a woman in vulgar terms. And in contrast to the draft-avoiding Trump, Roosevelt’s physical courage—including in wartime—was legion.

Clinton, a liberal on domestic issues and a former secretary of state who favors an energetic U.S. presence overseas, is broadly within the state’s traditions. Supporters have compared her to the New Yorker Eleanor Roosevelt, but that is wishful thinking. Clinton neither inspires voters nor has she maintained the consistency of views as did the former first lady. In particular, she has changed her colors on trade, and for the reasons that Trump has criticized trade deals. Her opportunism better recalls Eleanor’s husband, FDR, or for that matter, the first New Yorker to become president, in the 1830s. That was the slyly partisan Martin Van Buren, who helped to develop the Democrats into a modern political party.

Still, partisan or not, New Yorkers on the national scene have generally stood for something larger than the merely parochial: internationalist foreign policy views, broadly liberal politics and an open rather than a defensive posture toward foreign peoples and states. Clinton arguably aspires to that legacy; Trump does not seem to know that it exists. His victory would demonstrate how much the climate has soured even in the state that has been America’s portal to the world.