q. unless gary johnson, the libertarian party candidate, starts to catch fire, we seem certain to elect a president from new york this year. how many times have both major parties nominated new yorkers as candidates, and do those elections share any themes with this year<u+2019>s raucous campaign? a. the contest between hillary clinton and donald j. trump is the fourth in which new yorkers have served as nominees for the two major parties in a presidential election. and though this year<u+2019>s election is truly one of a kind, each of the three earlier new york-centric campaigns had at least one similarity with the current one. the previous pairing that most advanced-level trivial pursuit players would recognize would be from 1944, when franklin d. roosevelt , the three-term incumbent democrat and former new york governor, faced thomas e. dewey , the state<u+2019>s republican governor. in that race, dewey<u+2019>s campaign sounded a theme that has been revisited by mr. trump: questioning the health and stamina of his rival. (roosevelt died three months after being sworn in for a fourth term.) but in the waning months of world war ii , the overriding issue seemed to be whether the country wanted to switch leaders before victory was achieved. the results showed that it did not. four years earlier, another new yorker had tried to unseat president roosevelt : wendell willkie, who had led commonwealth & southern, an electric utilities holding company based in new york. before mr. trump won this year<u+2019>s republican nomination, as michael beschloss pointed out in the new york times last year , the selection of willkie was the only time a major political party in america had nominated anyone whose <u+201c>principal qualification was to have served as a corporate chief executive.<u+201d> but the dark days of the depression were coming to an end in 1940, and roosevelt won by 10 percentage points. ( willkie is sometimes omitted from the list of new york candidates: he was born in indiana, and located his campaign headquarters there , but he had been a new yorker for more than a decade before being nominated for president.) the first election in which new yorkers ran against each other had occurred 36 years earlier, and a roosevelt was involved in that one as well. that 1904 campaign pitted theodore roosevelt , the incumbent republican president and the former new york governor, against alton b. parker, chief judge of the new york court of appeals. some of mr. trump<u+2019>s supporters have compared him favorably to teddy roosevelt, and indeed, like mr. trump, roosevelt was colorful, bellicose and born into a wealthy family. and as has occurred with mr. trump, opponents suggested that roosevelt was perhaps a bit off his rocker. the democrats attacked the roosevelt administration as <u+201c>spasmodic, erratic, sensational, spectacular and arbitrary<u+201d> and offered their candidate as the <u+201c>sane, safe choice,<u+201d> according to the website of the miller center of public affairs at the university of virginia. the opposition<u+2019>s charges would make little impact on roosevelt, partly because of parker<u+2019>s lethargic strategy. <u+201c>he decided to conduct a <u+2018>front porch<u+2019> campaign, which was basically to sit back and let voters and well-wishers come to him, where he would entertain them with speeches,<u+201d> the historian sean munger wrote on his website . <u+201c>the problem was that parker<u+2019>s front porch was located in the remote town of esopus, new york, far up the hudson river.<u+201d> the <u+201c>spasmodic<u+201d> and <u+201c>erratic<u+201d> candidate won easily. email: fyi@nytimes.com a version of this article appears in print on october 9, 2016, on page mb4 of the new york edition with the headline: f.y.i. order reprints | today's paper | subscribe
how many times have both parties nominated new yorkers for president?
steve bell