Should New York Be Split Into 2 States? [POLL]

There's an old joke about asking a "real" New Yorker where upstate New York begins. The answer is 96th Street. Well, an "upstate" lawmaker isn't seeking to be that extreme, but she wants to explore turning the state of New York into two separate states.

State Sen. Daphne Jordan, R-Clifton Park, Saratoga County, said it's time to see what such a split would look like and, perhaps more importantly, how much it would cost, nbcnewyork.com said.

Splitting up a state is not a new concept.

Across the country, there was recently a movement to split California — and its reliably Democratic Electoral College votes — into three states.

Proposition 9 made it onto the California ballot for a vote in November 2018 but a court ruling nixed it before the voters could go to the polls, CNN.com said.

Back in New York, Jordan wants to create a 15-member working group that would be overseen by the state's comptroller's office, that would figure out how much it would take to split up all the state government agencies, wrangle with land disputes and find out what it would take constitutionally to create two separate states.

Her measure, which doesn't have any co-sponsors in the Assembly yet, would draw the line at Westchester and Rockland, making those counties and all of New York City and Long Island the downstate state.

Putnam, Orange and the remaining 51 counties would be considered upstate.

A discussion on Reddit about where upstate New York starts yielded mixed results.

One responder said that everything north of Westchester should be considered upstate, while another argued that Poughkeepsie is still covered by Metro North — it is the northern terminus for the Hudson Line — so anything that has "a direct pipeline to NYC is probably not upstate."

And then there was someone on Reddit who said, "Yeah, I get nosebleeds above 14th."

Back to politics, the state is predominantly Democratic, with Dems outnumbering Republicans by more than 2 to 1, syracuse.com said.

The most recent statewide election gave Democrats majorities in both the Senate and Assembly, not to mention re-electing Gov. Andrew Cuomo, so it would seem an uphill slog getting separation legislation through the process.

E.J. McMahon, from the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, said there are indeed real differences between upstate and downstate New York.

However, he said, it would take a lot of reform by upstate politicians to do a complete reset of how government is funded.

"[U]pstate politicians have not exactly been clamoring for the reforms that it would take to make that happen," McMahon said.

So now it's your turn to weigh in. Vote in our unscientific poll and tell us what you think in the comments.