I thought you guys might enjoy this.
On alternate history.com, somebody made a thread about how one might divide New York. I had the concept of two states. The first, New York, was New York City and the major population centers around it. The second, Niagara, was the rest of New York state. This obviously gave me the idea of seeing how a divided New York would fair in Presidential elections. The result was this:
Really, all separating New York City and its surrounding population centers does is give the Democrats free electoral votes. Truthfully though, I'm almost surprised that Barack Obama didn't get more here. He's fallen just short of 70%, bringing this state on par with Vermont's performance in 2008.
But this is really the interesting result. Without New York City, the rest of New York state was closer than Wisconsin, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania in 2008. A lean-D state to be sure, but I'm interested to see if Romney might win the region this year, or if Bush did in 2000 or 2004.
