NY would vote for Hitler if he had a D next to his name.
I grew up in western NY.
There is a big difference in the state once you go north and west of Westchester county.
NY is a big farming/dairy state. I still have a cousin who owns a farm on the eastern edge of Erie county. He no longer has Holestiens(black and white milk cows). He now has Angus beef, pigs and Maple syrup on his 250 acres. His neighbor across the road milks over a hundred cows. He also employs a bunch of illegals to milk them. Most of the big yogurt makers are in east central NY.
The Adirondacks is mountains and lakes as far as you can see. There is enough Methane in the shale of NYS to power the eastern half of the county for the next hundred years. However, fracking is not allowed.
The problem is that all the old rust belt cities(Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica) have been in decline since the 1970s. The Unions killed those towns. I saw it first hand with guys that worked at Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna.
Rochester had Kodak, Xerox and Baush & Lomb(sp?). All three of those companies are a shell of their former self.
Syracuse had steel mills too. They made Onnandoga Lake one off the most polluted in the country. Other than that is it a big college town. Utica is/was always a mob town. The land of the women with mustaches.
Every one of my family left NYS after graduating from a SUNY college with a four year degree. There were no prospects for a good career and life there in the 1980s & 1990s.
Andrew Cuomo made it worse. Maybe the people left there will finally wake up and vote out the people that keep making it worse.