On November 6th, 1888, Grover Cleveland lost New York — and with it, the Presidency — by 14,373 votes. The fifteen counties that make up the North Country gave Benjamin Harrison a net margin of 28,040 votes, twice his statewide lead. Had Cleveland carried his home state, where he served as Mayor of Buffalo and Governor, the incumbent Democrat would have been re-elected by seven electoral votes.
That was the North Country’s high-water mark of national relevance.
In the Gilded Age, New York was a swing state routinely decided by a few thousand votes, and the North Country was the Republican counterweight to heavily Democratic Tammany Hall, which dominated the five boroughs. It is a strange dynamic to recall today, when the region casts barely 6 percent of the state’s ballots and Democratic Presidential candidates carry the state by millions of votes. Back then, Cleveland, much like our current Commander in Chief, had staked his Presidency on tariffs, albeit from the opposite perspective. The Mills Bill, which passed the House but died in the Senate (along party lines), would have allowed raw wool and sawed lumber into the country with no import tax. It became one of the central issues of the 1888 campaign, particularly in New York, as Republican newspapers warned that cheap timber and wool from Canada would hurt their forests and farms.
It is tempting to read the North Country’s large margin for Harrison as a vote of economic self-interest, but the county returns tell a more nuanced story. The margins in Essex (iron) and St. Lawrence (lumber, dairy) counties barely moved compared to 1884. Franklin County, by contrast, swung further towards the GOP than any county in the state, as newly naturalized French Canadians swelled voter rolls in the lowland counties adjacent to Lake Champlain. But a better explanation of the region’s partisan lean dated back three decades, when the Republican Party was founded in the 1850s as an anti-slavery party of Yankee Protestants. The North Country was Yankee Protestant to its core, with an organized abolitionist community; John Brown settled in North Elba (where he is buried) to help a settlement of Black farmers known as “Timbuctoo,” which was deeded to them by wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith (New York required Black men to own $250 in property to vote). St. Lawrence County broke for Abraham Lincoln by 47 points and Ulysses S. Grant by 50. The nearest reliably Democratic county was Schoharie — Palatine German, Dutch Reformed — which in 1896 was the only county in New York to vote for William Jennings Bryan.
For a century after the Civil War, the North Country’s politics were shaped by religion: a (French Canadian) Catholic border and (Irish, Italian, Slavic) Catholic valley of Democrats; and a Protestant Republican fortress in between.
The Yankee Protestant hill counties — Essex and Warren in the Adirondack interior; Jefferson and Lewis on the Tug Hill plateau and the Lake Ontario shore; Washington along the Vermont state line; and St. Lawrence on the river’s north slope — voted Republican the way they went to church: habitually, and without discussion. (Hamilton was the exception, voting Democratic until William McKinley, and then not looking back). Calvin Coolidge carried Fulton by 53 points in 1924, while Dwight Eisenhower carried Hamilton by nearly 70 in 1956, and Essex and Warren by 64 apiece. The working-class locals who depended on the tourist economy voted, each November, like the seasonal aristocrats whose cottages sat empty every winter.
In 1860, according to historian Patrick Lacroix, more than a quarter of Clinton County had been born in Canada, and nine in ten were French. Overwhelmingly Catholic, they came down the Richelieu River, built St. Peter’s in Plattsburgh and Notre Dame in Malone, keeping their saints’ days and anglicizing their surnames (Charpentier became Carpenter, Leblanc became White). By 1930, there were still more than 5,000 French Canadians in each of Clinton, Franklin, and St. Lawrence counties; (today those three counties rank first, second, and third in New York for Canadian ancestry). In 1928, when Al Smith (Irish Catholic, wet, from the Lower East Side) ran for President and lost New York by two points, he carried the five boroughs, Albany, Rensselaer, and only two counties north of the Mohawk Valley: Clinton, by sixteen points, its first Democratic vote since Union general George McClellan in 1864; and Franklin, by six votes out of nineteen thousand cast. Eight years later, when Smith publicly broke with FDR and aggressively stumped against the New Deal, Clinton’s Democratic margin shrank from fourteen points in 1932 to less than two, while Franklin flipped to Alf Landon by thirteen, even as Roosevelt’s statewide margin grew by seven points. Across the lake, Vermont’s French-Canadian lowlands held steady; only the counties Smith had governed broke against FDR. The map held when the Democrats nominated another Catholic in 1960: John F. Kennedy carried Clinton, Franklin, Montgomery, and Oneida, but lost badly everywhere else in the North Country.
The Mohawk Valley’s mill towns filled with Irish, Italian, and Slavic Catholics during the industrial decades (the forty years between the mill boom of the 1880s and the Immigration Act of 1924, which curtailed Southern and Eastern European arrivals). Little Falls in Herkimer County knit underwear; Amsterdam in Montgomery County wove carpets; Gloversville and Johnstown in Fulton County made nine of every ten pairs of gloves sold in America between 1890 and 1950. Montgomery County voted for Roosevelt in 1936, its first Democratic presidential vote since 1876; Oneida County was the only county in the North Country that Harry Truman carried in 1948; (In 1912, Fulton County gave socialist Eugene Debs ten percent, the year of the Little Falls textile strike in neighboring Herkimer).
What did not move the region was just as instructive. Free silver had no constituency in the North Country; Catholic Clinton swung 28 points against William Jennings Bryan in 1896, harder than the Yankee counties did. The Greenbacks, Populists, and Robert La Follette’s Progressive Party all failed to crack eight percent in any of the North Country’s counties. The farm-protest vote that realigned the Great Plains never expressed itself in New York’s dairy country. In 1892, the Prohibition Party drew five percent in Saratoga, Washington, Fulton, and Warren — the Protestant edge of the Adirondacks — but a paltry percent or two along the Catholic border.
The Wet-Dry and Catholic-Protestant axes were the same.
Most of the region’s industry was owned by people who did not live in the North Country. The iron mines at Lyon Mountain belonged to Republic Steel of Cleveland; International Paper, headquartered in Manhattan, ran the big mills on the Hudson and Raquette River; the Adirondack timber tracts were controlled by downstate lumber syndicates (the outgoing Congressmember, Elise Stefanik, comes from this tradition: raised by a wealthy plywood distributor outside the district), and eventually the Great Camp families (the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Morgans). The politics of the ruling class who owned the land — the gold standard, protectionism, support for the GOP — became the politics of the working class. And as the tourists flocked north, most of the profits flowed south.
Then Albany and Washington started building, and for the half-a-century following the Second World War, the North Country’s growth industries were public.
Between 1954 and 1959, roughly 22,000 workers built the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Moses–Saunders power dam at Massena. Reynolds Metals opened an aluminum works in 1958; General Motors opened a foundry the following year, organized as UAW Local 465. Massena became what the North Country had never previously known: a three-plant union town. Lake Placid hosted the Winter Olympics in 1932 and again in 1980, the year of the Miracle on Ice. And, in 1971, Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed the law creating the Adirondack Park Agency at a time when only about one tenth of the Park’s communities had any zoning at all. The backlash to the park agency’s creation — threats against commissioners, conspiracy theories, one town voting to secede, and resentment of downstate liberalism — chronicled by Brad Edmondson in his book, A Wild Idea, foreshadowed the North Country’s shift to the right decades later.
Still, the biggest growth industry, by far, was prisons. As Brian Mann reported for Adirondack Explorer, New York held fewer than 20,000 inmates in 1959, but by the late 1990s, the state’s inmate count exceeded 72,000. The state’s prison building boom was kicked off by the 1973 Rockefeller Drug Laws, which established mandatory minimums for drug possession and sales. During his three terms as Governor, Mario Cuomo added more prison beds than every one of his predecessors combined. And, since land upstate was cheaper, the North Country, at the behest of Plattsburgh State Senator Ronald Stafford (the son of a corrections officer), absorbed many of these facilities. By the time the construction boom peaked at the turn of the millennium, there were twenty state and federal facilities in and around the Adirondacks. At Ray Brook, the federal prison is the former 1980 Olympic Village, while the state prison next door is a converted tuberculosis sanatorium; Moriah Shock Correctional Facility was built from old iron-mine buildings. Corrections soon became the North Country’s largest employer, as pensions and health care benefits filled the void left by the former mill economy, while the officer unions became one of the largest campaign donors (and sought after endorsements) in the area.
The Army also arrived in 1984, as the Pentagon selected Fort Drum for its newest light infantry division, and Jefferson County filled up with young military families. To this day, Fort Drum remains the largest single-site employer in New York State.
With prisons, an army base, SUNY campuses (Plattsburgh, Potsdam, Canton), hospitals, and the State Power Authority: the North Country’s economic base for the latter half of the twentieth century was the state. It is no accident that the most Democratic period in the region’s history coincided with the peak of its public economy. In 1996, Bill Clinton carried every county in the North Country (Lewis, Herkimer, and Jefferson included) except for Hamilton. The bluest county was St. Lawrence (D+29), the old Hoover-Eisenhower heartland, remade by colleges, union plants, and a government payroll.
But what the state giveth, the state taketh away. Plattsburgh Air Force Base closed in 1995, taking at least one thousand jobs and the better part of four thousand airmen with it. General Motors closed its foundry in 2009, eliminating another 500 jobs, while the old Reynolds works was shuttered five years later. The state’s inmate population peaked in 1999, and then, in the name of decarceration, the prison closures began in earnest: Camp Gabriels in 2009; Lyon Mountain in 2011; Chateaugay in 2014; Moriah Shock and Ogdensburg in 2022; and, this March, Bare Hill in Malone.
“An incarceration program is not an employment program,” explained Andrew Cuomo in his 2011 State of the State. And, correct as he was, to the white working-class of the North Country, the Governor sounded like a downstate liberal callously writing off the livelihoods that had just been eliminated — with nothing to replace them.
As late as 2012, the North Country was considered a purple region. In the 2009 Special Election to replace Congressman John McHugh, the local GOP nominated a moderate, while the Tea Party pushed Doug Hoffman on the Conservative Party ballot line. The moderate Republican dropped out and endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens, who became the first Democrat to win the North Country’s congressional seat since Reconstruction. Owens was re-elected twice more, in 2010 and 2012; in the latter, Barack Obama carried Clinton and Franklin by 26 points (and St. Lawrence by 17).
Elise Stefanik, a Harvard graduate with the Bush White House on her résumé, won the Congressional seat in 2014 as a 30-year-old tribune of the Republican establishment, only to spend the next decade becoming a fixture of the MAGA movement.
Then the floor collapsed in 2016. Against a national swing of only two points to the right, every county in the North Country (save for Hamilton) shifted by double digits. And the counties most animated by Donald Trump were those where people work the landscape: Franklin (prisons, dairy) shifted right by 32 points, Lewis (dairy, Fort Drum) by 29, St. Lawrence (the emptied foundry) by 26, Herkimer (the emptied mills) by 25.
Over the next eight years, the North Country’s politics cleaved into two. The working counties kept moving to the right, as the Democratic Party’s brand collapsed (Lewis became the second-most Republican county in New York, at R+44). The border and the Mohawk mill counties — Clinton, Franklin, Herkimer — shifted in line with the national pace. The amenity counties, those which sell the landscape (Lake George marinas, Lake Placid hotels, Keene Valley second homes) shifted to the left. Essex, formerly a stronghold of Hoover and Eisenhower (and a Presidential bellwether in the 21st Century), was won by Kamala Harris by 96 votes, despite the VP submitting the worst Democratic Presidential performance in New York since 1988.
It seemed as though the North Country would be held by the GOP in perpetuity.