Did the fall of Vito Fossella start the decline of the NYC GOP?

[Suburbia]

Remember Vito? The scandal-tarred GOP congressman from Staten Island?

When he had to retire due to a sex scandal, did that start the decline of the NYC GOP?

Wasn't he mayoral timber?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Remember Vito? The scandal-tarred GOP congressman from Staten Island?

No.

[Oryxslayer]

The fall of the NY Republican party began with the dismantling of the Nassau Machine in the late 80s/90s. Without the tons of banked votes guaranteed by the suburbs, the GOP were no longer able to crack the code to win a serious statewide race. Pataki was the last, and he was essentially on cruise control. When parties give up seriously contesting the big offices, they decline into their strongholds, and in doing so, tend to put off former potential voters. Focusing solely on small strongholds leads to more extreme voices getting microphones, which turns away more voters. The NYGOP today is more or less an upstate party + a few bits, which is what happens when the party pulled back from countless suburban towns.

It all just took a while to finally manifest in totality. That's how these things usually work out. Here's a good piece from 2010 on the topic:

https://twitter.com/SteveKornacki/status/1193877632275927040

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The GOP's perils in Nassau mirror the situation in Montgomery County PA, which was also at its zenith for the GOP in the early to mid 1980's, only to rapidly fall part for them thereafter.

The GOP went from being a party of conservative suburbs to being a party of religious conservatives, and there is a big difference between those those that is easy to under-appreciate. Throw gun control as it relates to crime into the mix and you have the general mix that accelerated the decline and collapse.

[Suburbia]

The NYC GOP, not the NY GOP as a whole.

Fossella was seen as 2009 mayoral material if Bloomberg did not change the city charter to run for a third term during the 2000s economic crisis.

[Non Swing Voter]

No.  This is a classic case of the Republicans trading the country club voters for the country voters.  Worked out in the Senate and here and there in national elections but it's a horrible tradeoff long term.  It's pretty remarkable that they've retained as much power in NY (including the state senate recently) as long as they have.

[Fuzzy Bear]

The GOP's perils in Nassau mirror the situation in Montgomery County PA, which was also at its zenith for the GOP in the early to mid 1980's, only to rapidly fall part for them thereafter.

The GOP went from being a party of conservative suburbs to being a party of religious conservatives, and there is a big difference between those those that is easy to under-appreciate. Throw gun control as it relates to crime into the mix and you have the general mix that accelerated the decline and collapse.

This part involves both the NY GOP and the NYC GOP.

The degree to which the GOP was, very much, the party of religious conservatives, came out in the open in 1992, and it produced a degree of realignment in the suburbs.  The other thing that happened was (as far as the NYC GOP goes) white CATHOLIC middle class flight to the suburbs, with their votes being replaced by a wide variety of minorities, including Asians, a group that did not have the prominence in NYC's group of ethnics until the 1990s.  Queens now has an Asian Congressional District that is made up of territory that was once (in large part) the Queens based district of James Delaney and Geraldine Ferraro, a district that carried for Reagan in 1984, and went 73-27 for Nixon over McGovern in 1972.  (Yes, a heavily Democratic registration CD wholly in NYC was Nixon's best in the entire STATE of NY in 1972!) 

Nassau County was once heavily, heavily Republican locally, but it was always more Democratic in Presidential races.  That was because Nassau County was considerably more Jewish than neighboring Suffolk County.  Suffolk County is far more Democratic today than it was in the 1970s, as is Westchester County.

What happened to NYC's GOP is simple:  Nothing.  Republicans elected to office in NYC is usually limited to Mayor, and none of them are elected without SIGNIFICANT Democratic support.  Reform Democrats supported LaGuardia, Impelletieri, and Lindsay.  (My mother worked in the law firm George Pataki later worked in with Impelletieri's wife, who was known as "Miss McLaughlin" back in the 1950s.)  Robert F. Wagner, Jr. (the Mayor) was offered a chance to be the nominee of the Republican and Liberal Parties in a 1973 comeback, courtesy of Nelson Rockefeller.  (Wagner thought about it and nixed the deal.) 

[Ye We Can]

Did the fall of George Opdyke start the decline of the NYC GOP?