Every New Yorker has an opinion on what makes someone a New Yorker.

Rudy Giuliani said it took ten years of living in the five boroughs. Another former mayor, Ed Koch, was more whimsical: “If you’ve lived here for six months and you walk faster and talk faster and think faster, you’re a New Yorker.” The radio personality Ira Glass gave possibly the most New York answer to the question in history: “Oh, for God’s sake. I could give a fuck.”

But for five individuals set on winning the hearts, and votes, of the world’s hardest-to-please people in Tuesday’s primaries, their New York City street cred is a matter of political life or death.

Why else would Hillary Clinton, who long ago wisely vowed never to allow campaign photographers to capture her eating on film, make a photo opportunity out of visiting Brooklyn’s most famous cheesecake bakery? Why would Ohio governor John Kasich hang out with some Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva students in Borough Park and then explain a story from the Torah to them? (Trust us, John, they know the story.)

But in a campaign where three of the candidates can lay claim to New York roots, how authentically New York are the people who hope to carry the Empire State?

Hillary Clinton

On the surface, the Democratic frontrunner has all the right ingredients to claim New York bona fides: she represented the state in the Senate for eight years; she and her husband have claimed residency here since they left the White House in 2001; the William J Clinton Foundation’s choice to locate its offices in Harlem coincided with the neighborhood’s economic revival; she saw Hamilton off Broadway.

But like a slice of pizza from Original Ray’s, much of Clinton’s relationship with New York is not quite as authentic as it first appears. Clinton was dogged by accusations of carpetbagging from her first day on the campaign trail in 2000; she and Bill Clinton live in the leafy Westchester hamlet of Chappaqua, which is as culturally close to New York City as the soundstage where 2 Broke Girls is filmed; the foundation moved its headquarters from Harlem to the soulless financial district more than five years ago.

All of which might explain why the former senator is emphasizing her New Yorker-dom with the earnestness of an off-brand Elmo busking in Times Square. The aforementioned visit to Junior’s Cheesecake in Brooklyn, the gratuitous MetroCard photo junket, the refusal to express a preference for either the Yankees or the Mets – it all reads a little desperate, like the girls dressed in red tights and bowler hats who hand out flyers for Chicago on Broadway. And in the capital of the world-weary poseur, New Yorkers don’t do desperate.

The verdict: Hillary Clinton is as New York as an NYU freshman from Minneapolis taking a trip on the Sex and the City tour bus.

John Kasich

The Ohio governor’s attempt to relate to everyday New Yorkers pretty much began and ended with his Torah-splaining to members of the Brooklyn Hasidic community, but, if he wanted to, John Kasich might have been able to fill a crucial New Yorker role: the role of the cranky old man.

Kasich was famous in Ohio for a notorious mean streak – the word press aides used to prepare reporters was “prickly”. This, of course, would make Kasich a perfect New Yorker. A hairpin trigger for insults and a willingness to call authority figures “jerks” from a safe distance are the birthright of every true Manhattanite of a certain age. Just picture Kasich in Midnight Cowboy, screaming “I’m walkin’ here!” at passing cab drivers.

But Kasich’s bid to overcome his prickly demeanor on the campaign trail has robbed him of any chance of claiming true blue New Yorker status. New Yorkers don’t try to improve their personalities – self-improvement schemes are limited to neglected yoga studio memberships and the occasional Juice Generation smoothie. We don’t apologize for anything – especially being a jerk.

The verdict: John Kasich is as New York as a discount “I [Heart] NY” T-shirt at a kiosk in Newark airport.

Ted Cruz

The senator from Texas isn’t making this easy.

“I think most people know exactly what New York values are,” Ted Cruz told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo during a January debate.

“Listen, there are many, many wonderful, wonderful working men and women in the state of New York,” Cruz explained. “But everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal, or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage, focus around money and the media.”

And to be frank, Cruz smirked, “not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan”.

Putting aside the obvious factual inaccuracies in that statement – William F Buckley, the grandfather of modern conservatism, was basically a Bonfire of the Vanities character brought to life – it wasn’t a smart move in the long run. Ever since Cruz’s “New York values” advertisements, stump speeches and debate one-liners in Iowa suggested that New York’s culture was inferior to that of middle America, urbanites already primed to be skeptical of a devout evangelical Christian Texan have become, as New Yorkers do, openly hostile.

Pretty much. Photograph: New York Daily News / WENN

But underneath his suggestion that Iowa’s values, or Iowa anything, are superior to New York’s, Cruz is covering up some serious New York values of his own.

With Princeton and Harvard degrees that any Dalton grad would be happy to claim, Cruz has shown little compunction about consorting with the same kinds of New Yorkers he derides. The senator, who has positioned himself as a strident opponent of same-sex marriage, was the guest last year of a pair of prominent gay hoteliers, Mati Weiderpass and Ian Reisner.



Cruz made an appearance at their Central Park South penthouse for a “fireside chat”, during which he assured them that he would love his own daughter no less if she were gay.

Some might call this hypocrisy, but New Yorkers call it opportunity. No New Yorker – at least, no New Yorker who works in finance – would think twice about telling one group of potential supporters that New York values are anathema to true conservatism while taking money and cocktails from another group of potential supporters in their Central Park South penthouse. That brand of cynicism is as New York as it comes.

The verdict: Ted Cruz is as New York as a party of Citigroup analysts sitting front-row at American Psycho: The Musical.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, and a non-New Yorker’s idea of a New Yorker. He’s brash! He’s rude! He never, ever apologizes!

Unfortunately, stereotypes sometimes exist for a reason.

Despite a tendency to make outer-borough mistakes like calling Sixth Avenue “Avenue of the Americas” – no New Yorker who wasn’t a construction magnate would ever waste that much breath describing an address – Donald Trump is as iconically New York as the tabloid newspapers who documented (and aided) his rise to international fame and infamy.

It’s telling that the most humanizing moment of Trump’s presidential campaign was his response to Cruz’s aforementioned bashing of “New York values” on the Fox Business Channel debate stage.

“He insulted a lot of people,” Trump responded. “New York is a great place. It’s got great people, it’s got loving people, wonderful people. 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.”

Even Cruz applauded at that line.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, and the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death ... and 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.”

Even if his name weren’t plastered across a stretch of Riverside Drive the length of five football fields; even if the construction of Trump Tower hadn’t ignited the condominium fever that has driven Manhattan real estate prices into the stratosphere; even if he hadn’t appeared in a national commercial for New York-style pizza as the typification of New York-style excess, the Donald would be quintessentially New York.

The verdict: Donald Trump is as New York as accidentally giving inaccurate subway directions to a tourist.

Bernie Sanders

From the moment the Vermont senator opens his mouth, he is unmistakably, yuuugely New York.

A cantankerous Brooklyn-born Jewish political activist who has made disrupting the plans of a Westchester millionaire his life’s mission, Bernie Sanders is the hero in every little-guy-takes-on-City-Hall movie about New York: he’s Davis in Manhattan, he’s Vito in Do The Right Thing, he’s Tess McGill in Working Girl, he’s Jack Kelly in Newsies.

If being a New Yorker means missing what New York used to be, then Sanders is the apotheosis of what New York used to be: gritty, unrefined, without pretense or prevarication. He’s cranky, he’s overconfident, he’s a little fuzzy on the details – he’s exactly what was promised to every kid who dreamed of getting out of the suburbs or the heartland or some other city that still didn’t feel like The City. He’s New York before the M&M Store, before CBGB became a John Varvatos, before 5 Pointz was painted over and turned into condos.

If Donald Trump is what every non-New Yorker thinks of when they think of New York, Bernie Sanders is what every New Yorker thinks of when they think of real New York.

The verdict: Bernie Sanders is New York.