In the summer of 2001, Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton—the first family of Arkansas in a past life—completed their move from the White House to Chappaqua, N.Y., just north of Manhattan. As Bill Clinton concluded his second presidential term, Hillary began to serve the first of her two terms in the U.S. Senate, representing New York.
Harlem's famous senior Congressman Charlie Rangel had urged Hillary to run for Senate in the first place. In 2001, Rangel welcomed Bill Clinton and his namesake foundation to Harlem with open arms.
Chelsea Clinton would go on to study and teach public health at Columbia University. The Clinton Global Initiative, which Bill founded in 2005, would settle into midtown Manhattan. After serving as U.S. Secretary of State under President Obama, Hillary Clinton would launch her own, second presidential campaign, with headquarters in Brooklyn Heights.
That groundwork, under construction since 1998, accounts for an immeasurable share of the advantage that Hillary Clinton leveraged to win yesterday's Democratic primary election in New York.
"In this campaign, we've won in every region of the country," Clinton told supporters in a televised victory speech last night. "But this one's personal."
Thank you, New York. You put your faith in me 16 years ago and again tonight. I'll never stop fighting for you. -H pic.twitter.com/Tqp8lCYhvq
Clinton, the former U.S. secretary of state, defeated her leftist, Brooklyn-bred rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, by almost 16 percentage points, consistent with major polling forecasts. The political analyst Harry Enten, writing for FiveThirtyEight, finds, "The outcome almost certainly ensures that Clinton will beat Sanders in the elected delegate count after the final Democratic votes are counted in June."
The late-stage soreness of both campaigns is palpable; five days before the primary, CNN hosted Sanders and Clinton in their most acrid confrontation yet. In the televised debate held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Sanders and Clinton sparred over mass-incarceration, banking reform, Israel, and reproductive rights. "The CNN debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was not, substantively, much different from their previous showdowns," wrote TV critic James Poniewozik for the New York Times. "But man, was it louder."
Such acrimony on stage reflects a general hostility between the two remaining Democratic candidates, and their surrogates: In a recent speech, Bill Clinton groused that Sanders' core supporters would rather "shoot every third person on Wall Street" as a pathway to banking reform, for instance.
If there's an outsized threat to Wall Street, however, it's the cataclysmic prospect of a Donald Trump presidency. Trump, a shocking and unwieldy populist, has disparaged hedge fund managers, and he’s advocated against certain corporate tax loopholes, and he’s pledged to raise tax rates for the most wealthy Americans.
Trump, the GOP field’s only native New Yorker, won 60 percent of his party's vote in the New York primary—his biggest statewide vote share of the primary season so far. Texas senator Ted Cruz, who admonished Trump's "New York values" before the Iowa caucuses in February, placed a distant third with just 14 percent of support among the Republicans who turned out in Trump’s home state. Ohio governor John Kasich placed second with 25 percent of the GOP vote.
Given Trump, Sanders, and Clinton's respective ties to the state—to NYC in particular—this year marks the first election in recent memory where New York's presidential primary outcome is pivotal to the nomination process of both parties. (Both Clinton and Sanders won more total votes in the Democratic primary than Trump won in the GOP primary. Clinton won just over a million votes in New York.)
In a break from the competitive moderation of past Democratic primaries, the fight for New York, and Sanders' socialist platform, have urged Clinton's rhetoric and priorities to the left. Last week, both candidates joined striking Verizon workers on a picket line in midtown Manhattan. Both Sanders and Clinton rallied in the Bronx. Sanders also rallied in Greenwich Village and Long Island City, and he toured the Flatbush and Brownsville neighborhoods in his native Brooklyn.
Since Sanders has spent his entire political career in Vermont, his ties to New York are largely nostalgic; Clinton, however, has been hitting this pavement since the turn of the century. In February, Charlie Rangel welcomed Hillary Clinton, his preferred candidate in the New York primary, to a race and politics forum on West 135th Street—just as Rangel welcomed Bill Clinton to West 125th Street fifteen years ago.
