Michael Tomasky plays the upstate card in a Washington Post article on the future of the Democratic Party:

Michael Tomasky, executive editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine and the author of a book on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, said people should not assume she cannot win moderate voters the same way her husband did. In 2000, he noted, she defied stereotypes and ran nearly even with her opponent in Upstate New York, which normally votes overwhelmingly Republican.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! Obnoxiously quoting myself:

First of all, her 55%-43% win was not exactly a landslide. As the Almanac of American Politics 2002 points out, Chuck Schumer beat Al D’Amato by an almost identical margin of 55%-44% in the 1998 race for New York’s other Senate seat, and Hillary was riding the coattails of Al Gore, who won the state 60%-35%. According to Barone and company, when you break it down by region, she won New York City 74%-25%, lost in the suburbs 53%-45%, and lost upstate 51%-47%. The latter two numbers are pretty good, but again, compare her to Schumer — he won New York City 76%-23%, lost the suburbs 51%-49% and lost upstate 53%-45%. The figures are almost identical.

The obvious conclusion is that Hillary did about as well as your average Democrat in a Democrat-leaning state. While things could have gone much worse given how polarizing she was, it proves almost nothing about her ability to win over voters in the the battleground states of the industrial Midwest, let alone the South.

More data: Bill Clinton won upstate New York 50%-37% in 1996. Don’t believe the hype!