Not that this would ever happen.

The other day Rob Astorino, the Westchester County exec who's running for governor as a Republican, tweeted a jab at the Cuomo administration over the number of jobs upstate. We'll leave it to someone else to assess the merits of this jab, but a construction Astorino (or whoever tweets for him) used caught our eye: "If upstate New York were a state itself..."

And that got us thinking a little bit: What if Upstate and Downstate New Yorks broke up? What would they look like in a few basic ways?

So we pulled together some numbers...

First off

This is ridiculous. New York State isn't going to break apart.

What do "upstate" and "downstate" mean in this context? Well, that's always a subject of debate, but for our purposes:

+ Downstate = NYC + the Long Island counties + Rockland and Westchester counties

+ Upstate = every other county

Some people might argue that Putnam County should be included with the downstate group. These people wouldn't be wrong. Some other people might argue even more of the Hudson Valley should be included with Downstate. Those people wouldn't be wrong, either. But these are the definitions we used. It's arbitrary.

Also, we're comparing apples and pears in some of these categories.

And again, this whole thing is ridiculous.

Downstate vs. Upstate

This sort of question could be pretty much as complicated as you'd like to make it. We decided not to do that, instead limiting things to a few broad categories. This is superficial at best.

Notes

+ Population (ACS 2012 5 yr) and area via the Census Bureau.

+ The tax revenue number is very, very squishy -- at best, a generalized guess. It's based on: 1) That New York State's total state tax revenue is approximately $90 billion and 2) estimated shares of tax revenue by region based on a Rockefeller Institute report from 2011 (which included Putnam County with downstate).

+ Employed and unemployed numbers are 2013 annual avg, via NYS Department of Labor.

+ GDP numbers are via National Association of Counties, which in turn drew on Moody's Analytics data.

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Earlier on AOA: What would you call a New York State without New York?