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Democrats in New York Can Already Hear Iowa’s Siren Song
When Mayor Bill de Blasio deplanes in Des Moines on Tuesday, it will mark the first landfall of a New York politician in the presidential proving grounds of Iowa ahead of 2020.
It almost certainly won’t be the last.
The New York region is currently home to the most concentrated glut of nationally ambitious Democratic politicians in the country — a confluence of egos and sometimes overlapping constituencies that all but guarantee friction in the coming years as they scramble up the political ladder.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has built a national following for her opposition to President Trump, so much so that he attacked her personally on Twitter last week. Andrew M. Cuomo is running for a third term as New York governor next year and has become increasingly engaged and outspoken on federal affairs, especially on the looming tax bill. Just next door in New Jersey, which overlaps with the influential New York City media market, is Senator Cory Booker, who recently campaigned aggressively in Alabama and who is on almost everyone’s list of possible contenders. Even 44-year-old Senator Chris Murphy of neighboring Connecticut is featured highly on some lists of 2020 possibilities.
All this, after the 2016 presidential election starred two New Yorkers, Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton, and a prominent runner-up in Senator Bernie Sanders, who, despite having lived in Vermont for decades, still sports the pronounced Brooklyn accent of his youth.
“Any of these people from New York with dreams of being in the White House would do themselves a favor if they understood that there is a lot of distance between Times Square and the state fair in Iowa,” said Alice Stewart, a Republican political strategist and veteran of past presidential campaigns.
Ms. Gillibrand, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Booker, Mr. Murphy and Mr. de Blasio will almost surely not all run for president simultaneously. None of them is openly talking about running yet, and all brush aside such questions for now.
Mr. de Blasio, for one, is headed to Iowa even before being sworn into his second term as mayor, which he has repeatedly pledged to serve out. But even if he is not a candidate himself, Mr. de Blasio has made plain his desire for a national bully pulpit that so far has eluded him, sometimes to an embarrassing extent — his efforts to organize a presidential forum in Iowa last cycle, for example, flopped when no one would agree to attend.
“I want to use my voice to support change in our party and in our country,” Mr. de Blasio said in a radio interview last week.
Some political watchers from states where the nation’s cable networks aren’t headquartered wonder why so many New York-area politicians feel so entitled to be heard across the nation.
“There’s an awful lot of us who don’t think, at the end of the last campaign, that we did a good enough job of talking to rural folks, whether it’s Iowa or Wisconsin or Michigan,” said Scott Brennan, a former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. “If anything, that becomes a bit of a concern for people from New York.”
But as Hector Figueroa, the president of a chapter of the Service Employees International Union that counts more than 150,000 members across 11 East Coast states, put it, “Any New Yorker always thinks New York is the center of the universe.”
“This is New York City,” Mr. Figueroa added. “We’re the capital of the world.”
It certainly felt that way in a 2016 presidential election where Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton made a point of trying to return home after nearly every day on the campaign trail. Mr. Trump would fly his personal jet to La Guardia Airport and then trundle in a motorcade back to Trump Tower in Manhattan; Ms. Clinton would fly her campaign plane back near her compound in Chappaqua.
For the current collection of Democrats, the most immediate political risk is that they will undercut one another with their overlapping donors and constituencies.
That is what happened in 2015, when former Gov. Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio actively competed for support among Florida Republicans and then spent millions to pummel one another as they were eliminated from the 2016 presidential sweepstakes.
In New York, Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio have jabbed at each other almost continuously for more than two years. Most recently, the mayor criticized the governor’s attempt to broker peace among Democratic lawmakers in Albany as a “charade” motivated by Mr. Cuomo’s national ambitions. (Mr. Cuomo has said being governor is his “dream job” and that he is only running for re-election.)
That spat ended up with the mayor’s press secretary highlighting that one of Mr. Cuomo’s former top aides is going on trial in January. “The mayor has never had aides charged with corruption,” said the press secretary, Eric Phillips.
Others have played nice, so far. Mr. Booker and Ms. Gillibrand are said to have a good relationship in Washington. This year, in a local television interview, Ms. Gillibrand pledged to serve her full term if re-elected next year while talking up Mr. Cuomo, who will also be on the ballot in 2018, as a presidential contender.
“He’d be a great candidate,” she said. “He’s been a great governor. He’s done great things in our state.”
One positive for the current crop of New York-area politicians is that, even as the polarization between rural and urban America has grown, presidential politics seems increasingly nationalized, political strategists say. Few saw Barack Obama as an Illinois candidate, for instance, or Mrs. Clinton a New York one.
“I think geography means less today than either personality or ideology,” said Steve Jarding, a political strategist who has specialized in the elections of Democrats in more conservative parts of the country.
Ms. Stewart, the Republican strategist, who worked on Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, agreed, citing the example of Mr. Trump, whose political support hails far from his hometown.
“If you can convey to people that you are genuine in your concerns for their economic conditions,” she said, “and you can connect with them on an economic everyday level, they don’t care where you come from.”
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