Here is where we disagree. Buffalo, Ithaca, and Syracuse along with Watertown and the whole area around Lake Placid went heavily to Kerry. I think Westchester county went for Kerry too, but I'm not sure about this I think it is not at all sure that upstate would elect Republicans, and if they did they would probably be along the lines of Chaffee.
Around my neck of the woods, we would. Real ones, not RINOs that is.
If NYC formed its own state (let's call it Gotham), it would probably include not only the 5 boroughs, but also Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island and Westchester County just north of the Bronx, which would give the new state a suburban tax base. If those counties were removed from New York State, Kerry would have carried what remained of the state (let's call it Upstate) by exactly 336 votes in 2004. Of course, if Upstate was its own state, it would have been targeted by both parrties instead of being entirely ignored as it was in 2004, and who knows how the presidential vote would have turned out.
And if Hudson, Essex, Union, Middlesex, Mercer, Burlington and Camden Counties from NJ and added them to Gotham, along with Philadelphia and Delaware Counties from PA and New Castle County from DE, I guess we'd have to change Gotham's name to Megalopolis, and it would allow us to do the following:
(1) Make PA a comfortably GOP state that Bush would have carried by over 300,000 votes in 2004;
(2) Take Morris, Bergen, Passaic, Summerset, Hunterdon, Warren and Sussex Counties from NJ and add them to Upstate, which would allow Bush to have carried the new combined state by 50,000 votes;
(3) Combine Staten Island with the NJ counties of Monmouth, Ocean, Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland, Salem and Gloucester to create a quite Republican State of New Jersey;
and
(4) Take Kent and Sussex Counties from Delaware and add them to the new State off Maryland (which would have had Montgomery and Prince George's Counties excised and placed within the new state of New Columbia, as I described in post #131 above), which would have allowed Bush to carry the new State of Maryland by 65,000 votes.
The states of Megalopolis and New Columbia would, of course, each have 2 Democrat Senators (can you imagine Hillary, Schumer, Lautenberg, Corzine, Biden and Carper all fighting over the 2 Senate slots in Megalopolis?), but each of the four states of PA, MD, NJ and Upstate/North Jersey would almost certainly elect 2 Republican Senators. The region would go from having 8 Democrat Senators and only 2 GOP Senators (both from the tough-to-defend state of PA) to having 4 Democrat Senators and 8 GOP Senators. The GOP advantage in the Senate would go from 55-44-1 to a nearly filibuster-proof 61-40-1.
And in the Electoral College, a region that gave Kerry an 83-0 advantage over Bush would now give Kerry just 38 electoral votes (30 in Megalopolis and 8 in New Columbia), while Bush would receive 45 electotal votes (in addition, Bush would have carried VA quite handily, although it would have 11 instead of 13 EVs). Nationally, Bush would have received 329 Electoral Votes instead of 286.
I say we make this modest proposal to Congress and try to get it approved in time for the 2006 elections. : )