Cold Climates

[dazzleman]

The Bronx is probably the most heavily Democratic county in the country.

I would not consider the Bronx to be a close-in suburb.  It is inner city, much of it slums and crime-ridden public housing.  There are also some "better" areas, but in the context of the Bronx, that's not saying much.

New York City politics is heavily Democratic, although they've had a Republican mayor for 3 terms now.  The reason for that is that the Democrats have tripped over and gotten burned by the racial issue.

In New York City, Democratic doesn't always mean liberal.  Manhattan is the most liberal borough, since the northern part consists almost entirely of poor blacks and Hispanics, while the middle section consists of wealthy white limousine liberals.  There is little white working class in Manhattan.

Brooklyn and the Bronx are heavily black and hispanic, balanced off by some white working class voters.  The white voters are generally Democratic, but strongly hostile to blacks and, to a lesser extent, some hispanics, and will vote Republican, as they did in the mayoral election, if the racial issue is prominent in a given year.

Queens is like a pale imitation of the Bronx and Brooklyn.  It has more of a white middle class than those two boroughs, and is not as strongly Democratic, but still generally Democratic in orientation.

Staten Island is the only borough that could be classified as Republican.  It has a relatively small number of minorities, and many of the whites have fled from crime-ridden sections of Brooklyn.  Working and middle class whites in Staten Island, like their counterparts in other parts of the city, are strongly anti-black for the most part.

Race has played a major part in the last 3 mayoral elections.  In 1993, there was a black Democratic mayor (Dinkins) who had allowed crime and rioting to run rampant, and the city voted almost exclusively among racial lines to oust him in favor of Rudy Giuliani.  Giuliani was highly successful in reducing crime, and was strongly re-elected in 1997.  Term limits prevented him from running in 2001.

The Democrats fell into disarray in 2001 because the one minority candidate who was running, Bronx Borough President Ferdinand Ferrer, was defeated in the primary run-off, so some of the blacks and hispanics refused to vote for the Democratic candidate that won the run-off.  The result was that Michael Bloomberg, a nominal Republican, won the election.

The close-in suburbs consist of Westchester County to the north, bordering on the Bronx, and Nassau County to the east, bordering on Queens.  Staten Island is close to New Jersey.  In the past, the suburbs have been reflexively Republican due to their deep-seated hostility toward New York City and its politics.  Ironically, NYC's Republican Mayor Giuliani helped to dull this trend by improving conditions in the city and the image of the city to the point that suburbanites don't feel that they have to vote a certain way out of hostility toward the city.  The suburbs still generally vote Republican in state-wide elections, but not national elections at this point.

I hope this gives you a little bit of perspective on New York politics.  There is a lot more, but time is limited right now.

[dazzleman]

A lot depends on semantics.  The typical American definition of a suburb is an area outside a city in which single family, owner-occupied housing (as opposed to multi-family and rental units) predominates, with separation between commercial and residential land uses.

By this definition, Staten Island and parts of Queens are quasi-suburban, but the Bronx and Brooklyn are not.  Even some close-in parts of Westchester and Nassau County have become so urbanized and built up that it's hard to consider them suburban.

Suburbs also have the connotation of being desirable places to live, a level above the close-in urban areas.  This is definitely not true of the Bronx.  I know many people who grew up there, and they all virulently hate it.  They talk about living there as if it were a prison sentence, and vow to either get out at the earliest possible opportunity, or, if they have already gotten out, to never go back.  They would also laugh in your face if you called it a suburb.