NEW YORK, July 29 (UPI) -- The three-way contest for the support of the Democratic Party in this year's race for governor of New York continues. Three-way? Aren't there just two Democratic candidates for governor in this September's primary: Andrew Cuomo and Carl McCall?
In theory, yes, In practice, no. The third candidate, and so far the front-runner in the race for support by Democratic interest groups, contributors, and, sometimes, even politicians, is incumbent Republican Gov. George Pataki.
Ironically, the utter collapse of the New York state Republican Party as an ideological and political force is the main reason that Pataki's bid for re-election is going so well. It is a commonplace that Pataki, narrowly elected governor over incumbent Mario Cuomo in 1994, has moved from the right to the center and now even to the left-of-center, and that this change is largely a response to the fact that registered Democrats now outnumber registered Republicans in the state by 5 million to 3 million.
Without any serious conservative presence in New York, the incumbent governor has found it best to run for re-election as a crypto-Democrat. And, so far, he's been so successful in doing so that the actual Democratic primary between McCall and Cuomo has seemed almost a side show.
In a way, Pataki is following the path blazed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an erstwhile liberal Democrat who succeeded in being elected as a Republican by a timely and late "conversion" and dollops of money.
The "success" of such Republicans in remaining competitive at the state level has obscured the evolution of many Northeastern states in a one-party Democratic direction at the national level. But it's not enough to take Republican decline for granted -- it begs explanation.
It's easy to trace the beginning of this trend back to Barry Goldwater's race for president in 1964, when he joked about cutting the East Coast adrift, and the entire Northeast turned against him by landslide proportions. Since then, the Republican Party has steadily become the vehicle of the South and West, in protest against the Northeast, in a well-known reversal of the old Bryan-McKinley race of 1896.
The increasing "cultural" dimension of national politics has naturally made "bicoastal America" more Democratic, and "fly-over country" more Republican.
But the turn against the Republicans in the Northeast has not been simply an affair of the great Eastern cities. In New York State, Republican power was based on the Upstate counties, even including such large cities as Syracuse, which was for most of the 20th century the most Republican big city in the nation.
As political scientist Frank Munger pointed out in 1958, New York state outside of New York City was as urban, industrial, and Catholic as the states of Massachusetts and Illinois, yet, in reaction to the presnce of Gotham, voted far more Republican than might have been "expected."
From the 1830s all the way to the horrible decade of the 1970s, upstate New York was one of the most productive and innovative areas of the nation. Many of the most profound innovations and technologies and some of the most important companies in the U.S. started there.
Upstate thought of itself as productive, and the city as filled with scrounging loafers. Now it is an economic basket case. Buffalo, for instance, which was the eighth-largest city in America when President William McKinley was assassinated at the exhibition there in 1901, is now the 56th-largest city.
One could go so far as to describe most of upstate New York as now a clientele instead of a citizenry. They need the government to help them, for the private sector no longer can. That transformation, as much as anything else, explains the changing state of upstate voting, which now gives the Republicans only small margins.
Upstate turned violently against 20 years of Democratic governors in 1994, and provided monstrous margins for Pataki, enabling him to squeak into the governorship that year. But with Pataki in power for eight years, and not much improvement, and the continuing challenge there from upstate billionaire Tom Golisano, Pataki can't count on such margins any more than other Republican candidates can.
Meanwhile, the total failure of Republican machine governance in the largest of New York City's suburban counties, Nassau, which achieved the remarkable result of going bankrupt at the height of the 1990s boom, brought down Republican power in the suburbs as well.
Ironically, it was only with Rudy Giuliani in overwhelmingly Democratic New York City that Republican governance, if there is such thing, showed itself in a better light.
Now Pataki has been concentrating much of his effort in New York City, and so far, he has been doing it successfully.
His Republicanism, these days, is only putative. In reality, he is running as the third, and so far, the most successful Democratic candidate for governor.
But if Pataki wins this year, as expected, his path won't demonstrate any path for national Republicans. Ironically, there are only two strong potential Republican candidates to succeed him -- Giuliani and Bloomberg, neither of whom has much in common with the national party.
From the point of view of national politics, the race for New York State governor is irrelevant, and it will remain so in the future. It's hard to remember that Republicans carried the state in six of the 10 presidential elections between 1948 and 1984.
