United States presidential election in New York, 1936

The 1936 United States presidential election in New York took place on November 3, 1936. All contemporary 48 states were part of the 1936 United States presidential election. New York voters chose 47 electors to the Electoral College, which selected the President and Vice President.

New York was won by incumbent Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, who was running against Republican Governor of Kansas Alf Landon. Roosevelt ran with incumbent Vice President John Nance Garner of Texas, and Landon ran with newspaper publisher Frank Knox of Illinois.

A former Governor of New York who had easily carried the state in his 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin Roosevelt won New York State in 1936 by an even more decisive margin. Roosevelt took 58.85% of the vote versus Alf Landon's 38.97%, a margin of 19.88%.

Despite being Roosevelt’s home state, in the context of the 1936 nationwide Democratic landslide, New York weighed in for this election as four percent more Republican than the national average, although FDR won the state by nearly 20 points.

The presidential election of 1936 was a very partisan election for New York, with more than 97.8 percent of the electorate casting votes for either the Democratic Party or the Republican.

Roosevelt won his home state by means of a dominance of the massively populated New York City area, performing even more strongly than he had in 1932. Roosevelt took over seventy percent of the vote in the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and took over sixty percent of the vote in Queens and Staten Island. For the era, this was an historically overwhelming victory for a Democratic presidential candidate in the five boroughs of New York City, and enough to easily secure a statewide win for Roosevelt. The emergence of the New Deal Coalition was at its peak in 1936, and made American cities core bases of support for the Democratic Party. The Great Depression had accelerated the process of urbanization of the Democratic Party which had begun with the election of 1928, and Roosevelt’s landslide win in New York City was a fruit born by this process. 1936 was the third election in a row in which Democrats had won all 5 boroughs of NYC, following 1928 and 1932. After 1936, New York City would remain Democratic overall in every election that has followed, although no presidential candidate would sweep all five boroughs of NYC again until Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Partly as a consequence of this, FDR’s 1936 victory in New York State would also be the strongest statewide Democratic performance ever in terms of both margin and vote share until 1964.

In upstate New York, Roosevelt’s support was mostly concentrated in the cities. Roosevelt again carried the state capital of Albany, which since 1928 had become a Democratic stronghold of a city. Nearby Schenectady and Montgomery counties went Democratic as well. In 1936, FDR also managed to flip Erie County into the Democratic column, home to the city of Buffalo in western New York, up to that point a Republican city that had even held for Herbert Hoover in 1932. Finally flipping in 1936, Buffalo has remained a loyal Democratic bastion ever since. Monroe County, home to the city of Rochester, also swung from voting for Hoover in 1932 to Roosevelt in 1936.

However much of rural upstate New York remained one of the most loyally Republican regions in the nation throughout the FDR era, which many locals attributed to the fact that New Deal public works had barely affected the region. In northern New York, FDR lost Franklin County, which was won by him 1932 and even won by Al Smith in 1928, leaving Clinton County as the sole Democratic win in the region. Roosevelt’s only other wins in the state were pluralities in Rockland County and Sullivan County.