Who was the last republican nominee to win new york city?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The idea that the core aspirations of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party haven't changed much over the past two centuries is utter rubbish and that's putting it rather politely. Unless you believe that political philosophy is irrelevant, there's no basis for that claim. It's one thing to say that there is some kind of continuum between the Democratic Party of Jackson and the Democratic Party of Obama and quite another to say that the Democratic Party's core aspirations are the same. That strikes me as historical revisionism in its worst form.

Former plantation owners, who always voted for Democrats, certainly aren't "common men". Neither are Yankee smallholding farmers or Lutheran machinists/craftsmen, who tended to vote for Republicans. The proletarian "commen men" of immigrant stock in the North didn't care all that much about two party politics. This is why the New Deal transformed Americans: they finally had a reason to lay claim to American civic life. Before this, the two parties didn't stand for much besides patronage jobs, contacts with various bureaucrats within party machines and standing up for cultural traditions, either of the Old World (Papist, Democrats) or of the New World (Yankee Puritan, GOP).

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

The Republican Party isn't the party of business, the Republican Party is not the party of religious zealotry, the Republican Party is not the party of nativism etc. These terms strike me as being very imprecise, especially when you're describing the core values of a diverse party that has existed for 170 years.

The Republican Party is a sprawling big tent coalition that serves many interests and goals depending on the locale and its support base. A few decades it was an entirely different beast than it was in 2014, just as the Republican Party of the 1950s was an entirely different beast than the Republican Party of the 1980s. I think you're making the classic mistake of treating interests in a big tent, two-party system as static variables. In the American two party system, there has always been the presence of dynamic push-pull factors that destroy the notion of static coalitions, which are constantly shifting.

As for the comment about plantation owners, there's a reason why I used the term "former plantation owners": I was clearly alluding to the period after Reconstruction in the South.