Stuart Sutton, 42, is walking with his son down the streets of Harlem on a hot afternoon.

“My son did it all! Pre-K, Head Start, kindergarten. It’s never too early. The kids need it!

“They get fed all this stuff through the TV and media. They really need that extra boost that comes from pre-K!”

It’s August, and universal pre-K is a few days away from becoming a reality for over 50,000 four-year-olds. Against the odds, mayor de Blasio has made good on his key campaign promise.

Future generations may look back on de Blasio’s policy and forget the struggle he faced in Albany to fund it. A tax on the super-rich, de Blasio’s preferred method of funding, was shot down by Governor Cuomo. Over a hundred miles away, the policy of an elected mayor concerning his own city was blocked.

But what if things had been different? What if de Blasio hadn’t needed Cuomo’s permission? What if the city formed a state of its own?

“From a fiscal standpoint it certainly would be [a good idea],” said John Mollenkopf, director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

“Also, we would regulate ourselves on many aspects rather than have Albany do it. Of course we would replace the mayor with a governor, the city council with a legislature, et cetera.

“There are some interesting analogies in federal systems in Europe where cities are also states — for example Berlin and Hamburg in Germany.”

The idea of the city and upstate parting ways is nothing new. Divisions existed even before the US Constitution was ratified, when upstate antifederalists, led by Gov. George Clinton, clashed with city federalists, who published the Federalist Papers in the city press.

During the Civil War, pro-Confederacy mayor Fernando Wood called for the city’s full secession from the United States. In doing so, he hoped to maintain trade links with the Confederacy, and envisioned a city with zero taxes.

The move would be part of what he saw as a wider disintegration of the union: “California and her sisters of the Pacific” would also form a new nation, as would “the Western States”. This process was part of what Wood described as “the resolving of the community into its original elements”.

In 1969, it was Norman Mailer’s turn to make secession history. With a slogan of “no more bullshit”, Mailer ran in the Democratic primaries on a platform of splitting from Albany and banning cars from Manhattan.

“I’m running on a platform of ‘Free Huey Newton and fluoridation’. We’ll have compulsory free love in those neighborhoods that vote for it, and compulsory attendance in church on Sunday in those that vote for that,” he told a crowd. Mailer finished second to last.

A more recent proponent of secession has been former city council member Peter Vallone, Jr. His campaigns in 2003 and 2008 focused on the imbalance between upstate and the city.

A source said that the bill that the councilman put in was extremely popular with voters and good government groups, but as with most bills it needed the support of the mayor and speaker. Vallone had neither.

To make a new state, Vallone would have also needed approval from the existing state and the federal government. It isn’t without any precedent: West Virginia, Kentucky, Maine and Tennessee were all formed from territory previously administered by other states.

Vallone saw secession as a way of fixing a major inequality in New York State. Speaking to the New York Sun during his ’08 push, Vallone said: “If not secession, somebody please tell me what other options we have if the state is going to continue to take billions from us and give us back pennies.”

Billions? Then-mayor Michael Bloomberg had indeed testified in Albany that the city pays $11 billion more to the state than it gets back in funding.