As you may have heard, there was an unusual special election for a U.S. House seat in upper New York State last Tuesday. The Democratic candidate won. As this article shows, portions of the current district (which sprawls across the Adirondack mountains) have been represented in Congress only by Republicans ever since the 1850s, when the party originated. (The outline of the district or districts in that region, of course, changed somewhat every ten years with the Census and reapportionment.) Owens’ victory broke a very rare 145-year party stranglehold on a region. The article gives some fine detail on the history of congressional representation in that part of the state. [BP]
