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u.s. politics

Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, speaks during an event in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., on Sunday, April 10, 2016.Drew Angerer/Bloomberg

Ted Cruz stopped in a Chinese-Dominican restaurant in the Bronx and a matzo bakery in Brooklyn. Hillary Clinton visited the high-tech suburbs of Albany and dispatched her husband to the gritty suburbs of Buffalo. Donald Trump held a rally in the Long Island beach town where Theodore Roosevelt spent summers as a child and as president.

The American presidential campaign has moved to the wildest, rowdiest, most unruly and madcap political environment in the United States.

The April 19 New York primary is one part travelling circus and one part travelling salvation show. It reflects a raucous political culture more complicated than any in the United States, created by a population as varied as the United States itself. And though New York is only the 27th-largest state by total area, it encompasses more diversity in manufacturing and agriculture, the performing arts and the culinary arts, geography and geology, than perhaps any other. It is known as the Empire State but in fact is several empires: finance and fashion, broadcasting and Broadway.

It is in this swirling cauldron of commerce, controversy and inveterate complaining that the next vital stage of American presidential politics is being conducted. "This is going to be a spectacle the likes of which America hasn't seen for many years," says Michael Haselswerdt, a political scientist at Canisius College in Buffalo. "This is where all the talk of 'New York values' becomes real."

One of the values that is not being practised amid the bedlam and mayhem of Gotham is civility. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has the momentum in the Democratic race, but Ms. Clinton has the delegate lead, and already each – in the sort of white-hot rhetoric that the two have avoided since the autumn – is questioning the other's fitness for office.

For Mr. Sanders, this New York primary is no casual contest. He may be on a roll after victories in Michigan and Wisconsin but the only thing that would pierce Ms. Clinton's aura of inevitability would be a defeat in New York, where she makes her home and where she won two decisive statewide Senate campaigns.

At the same time, the Republicans are engaged in the latest "Stop Trump" event, this one in the city where he grew upin the comfortable Jamaica Estates section of Queens. Suddenly the phrase "New York values," which Mr. Cruz, an Alberta native but a Texas senator, clumsily employed to portray Mr. Trump as a denizen of America's den of iniquity, has lost its sting.

Besides, in truth there are many New York values. One of them is "buy low and sell high," popular on Wall Street, another is Go Bills, the fight song that former football coach Marv Levy developed for the only NFL team that actually plays its home games in the state. And there are many New Yorks.

There is New York City, of course, and the downstate suburbs on Long Island and in Westchester, and there are the urban centres of Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse, and there is the agricultural empire that accounts for New York ranking second in the nation in both milk and apple production. Just as Harlem has a culture all its own, the state capital of Albany has a culture all its own as well; you might think of it as Brasilia occupied by the Borgias, so distinct that William Kennedy, perhaps the poet laureate of the capital, has written eight sparkling novels in his celebrated "Albany Cycle." One of them bears the title The Flaming Corsage.

And though most of the campaigning in the 2016 primary has been in and around New York City, the candidates have made forays into the rest of the state. "The primary vote in New York may be heavily downstate, but you cannot win without campaigning in Albany and up in Buffalo and even in the southern tier of the state.You make a big mistake if you think New York State is an urban centre," says former Democratic lieutenant-governor Stanley Lundine, who lives on the shore of Lake Chautauqua in western New York.

That is a political truth that all five remaining presidential candidates are acutely aware of, for it was in New York where Mr. Sanders was born; where Mr. Trump now lives in Trump Towers and where he bases his business empire; where Governor John Kasich of Ohio often visited during his tenure as managing director of the investment banking division of New York-based Lehman Brothers; where Mr. Cruz's wife derived her paycheque as a regional head for Wall Street banking powerhouse Goldman Sachs; and where Ms. Clinton now makes her home.

Indeed, the former secretary of state possesses a formidable home-field advantage. During her statewide Senate campaigns and the "listening tour" she undertook as First Lady before declaring her candidacy, she visited all the important urban centres as well as some of the most remote rural villages; spent a summer holiday in Skaneateles, a lake town southwest of Syracuse; and became an evangelist for an obscure confection – wine ice cream from New York's fabled Finger Lakes.

As recently as the turn of the 21st century, New York politics was a cliché that consisted of bagels, baklava and blarney, pizza, pierogies, and parades – and pandering. Plus loads of falafel. That brand of politics, itself an extension of the ethnic forces that shaped the state, was perfected by Nelson Rockefeller, who served as governor of the state from 1959 to 1973 and who was never so happy as when he was stuffing a knish in his mouth and greeting voters with a basso profundo "Hiya, fella!"

"This is a far more complex place than it was in the Rockefeller years," says Kenneth Jackson, the Columbia University historian who is editor-in-chief of the two-million word Encyclopedia of New York City. "You now have huge Asian populations, lots of people from South America, many Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. Over all, New York is a lot less white. A mixed wedding here used to be an Irish Catholic and an Italian Catholic. Today the mixed weddings are really mixed."

There are, to be sure, some colourful remnants of the Rockefeller brand of politics but, before long, they may be as much a sepia-toned symbol of the past as Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that provided immigrants with jobs and candidates with votes throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th.

"New York has changed in the way that American politics has changed," says Richard Ravitch, former head of the New York City subway and bus system, a former lieutenant-governor of the state and a shrewd observer of the New York political scene. "There are no political parties that mean anything any more."

The changes are manifold and manifest, and the place that once was New Amsterdam, its 17th-century name, is new again in the 21st century, shaped by the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, which ended its sense of haughty invulnerability; by the new technology, which has spawned new businesses even as it has endangered the old titans of New York; and by the financial crisis of 2008, which stoked fresh resentments against American financiers and Wall Street traders.

In past New York presidential primaries, there was a serious battle for the endorsements of the editorial boards of The New York Times and the New York Daily News in the city and, to a lesser extent, Newsday on Long Island. That's no longer the case; it was Twitter that broke the news of the ditching of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. There once was enormous attention paid to labour endorsements. The unions aren't as powerful as they once were, when candidates convened conclaves of advisers to strategize how best to court Dennis Rivera, the powerful chief of the hospital-workers union.

Yet the ferocity remains. In 1992, former New York mayor Edward Koch described the contest as "the big time, the big apple," and he told me: "To us, this primary is a nice sporting event, though a blood sport. The thing we want to see is their blood – and we generally get our way. The winner of this is generally on the mat, only about two inches above the guy he defeated."

New York has changed, as it constantly does. But Mr. Koch's observation remains fresh. The state has a welcome mat, but its real political character is revealed on the wrestling mat.

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