NASHUA, N.H. — On the campaign trail and beyond, there may be no larger caricature of New York City than Donald Trump.
The affiliation has proved problematic for Trump as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination. In Iowa, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas took aim at Trump's "New York values," playing on the city's reputation for secularism and liberal politics. At home, top Democrats have disavowed Trump, calling his campaign a betrayal of the city's inclusive identity.
Trump has barreled over certain local sensibilities with his sheer New York-ness. At a rally in New Hampshire, deep in Boston Red Sox country, he declared that George Steinbrenner, the Yankees owner who died in 2010, had been a great personal friend. When Trump was forced to deliver his concession speech in Iowa, after a disappointing second-place finish behind Cruz, his profession of love for the state took the form of a real estate proposition.
"I think I might come here and buy a farm," he said. "I love it!"
But with the Iowa caucuses completed, Trump's image as a populist strongman from Manhattan may find more receptive audiences. In New Hampshire, the next state to vote, on Tuesday, Trump has led the polls by comfortable margins, and supporters there say there is nothing distasteful or suspicious about their candidate's political persona.
On the contrary, voters at two Trump events last week said his profile as a brass-knuckled and gaudy New Yorker — a rough-and-tumble type who has done exceptionally well for himself — represented the core of his appeal.
Rochelle Renna, an independent voter from suburban Nashua, said at a rally here that Trump projected a kind of New York toughness that she greatly admired.
"When you're a New Yorker, you tell it the way it is and you'll always know where you stand with the person," said Renna, a sales employee at Dell who said she had relatives in New York. She added, "New York City is where it's at and anything in New York City is awesome."
At an earlier Trump event in Farmington, a small town near the Maine border, Joe Goss, a mechanic from Ossipee, New Hampshire, said he was unfazed by Trump's brash demeanor or his New York roots. Asked how Trump had won his vote, Goss answered instantly, "By his arrogance."
"He's a city slicker," Goss said. "He's a smart man. He's a businessman."
As a tabloid fixture and a reality television star, Trump's image nationwide has long been that of a somewhat cartoonish mogul from New York, whose neon experience of the city evokes not Ellis Island and Greenwich Village, but Times Square and Fifth Avenue. He has boasted in interviews and books about his outsize exploits in boardrooms and bedrooms, describing himself as a man of wealth and taste who accepts only the most advantageous deals and is accustomed to the finest gold faucets.
Running for president, Trump has made a few cultural concessions to the heartland. He no longer calls himself an accomplished playboy, but instead talks about his love for his wife and children. Addressing raucous rallies in conservative states, Trump has conceded that his book, "The Art of the Deal," is only the second best of all time, after the Bible.
But Trump has never truly distanced himself from the city that made him rich and famous. He announced his candidacy in the atrium of the Trump Tower, outlining his biography as the story of a Queens boy who looked to the Manhattan skyline and told his father that his future lay to the west.
At his rallies, Trump is often introduced as, among other things, the man who saved Wollman Rink in Central Park from disaster. What would seem to be a parochial achievement nevertheless draws cheers from his crowds.
And when Cruz challenged Trump's conservative credentials at a debate last month — "not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan," he said — Trump invoked the city's recovery after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"I saw something that no place on earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York," Trump said. Cruz's comment, he said, was "very insulting."
Former Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-N.Y., called that moment in the debate a "great triumph" for Trump. Cruz, he said, had misunderstood the city's place in American life by attacking "liberal New Yorkers, like we're some kind of disease."
"People like the fact that Donald stood up for New York," said D'Amato, who is supporting John Kasich, governor of Ohio, for president. "They like the passion with which he stands up for his beliefs."
If Trump has found a fan base for his particular brand of New York values, it remains unclear whether he has assembled a winning coalition among conservative primary voters. After the New Hampshire primary, the Republican nomination fight shifts to tougher cultural territory, first in South Carolina and then a string of states across the Deep South.
The results from Iowa on Monday exposed some of the limits of Trump's support in a party anchored in communities of deep Christian faith. In the last week of the caucus campaign, Cruz aired a television commercial attacking Trump, titled "New York Values," featuring footage of a 1999 "Meet the Press" interview in which Trump called himself a fierce supporter of abortion rights.
"My views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa," Trump, who now opposes abortion, said in the footage.
Cruz poked at Trump's urban provenance again last week, dismissing barbed comments from Trump, using what he called "a New York term": Trump's attack, he said, was "the height of chutzpah."
At some point, the country may grow weary of an election so overwhelmed by New York personalities. Besides Trump, the race includes Hillary Clinton, who represented the state in the Senate and lives in Westchester County; Brooklyn-born Bernie Sanders; and perhaps, under certain circumstances, Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor who is weighing an independent campaign.
But in New Hampshire, where many voters have personal ties to the New York area and the city itself is not such a far-off and alien place, more than a dozen Trump supporters said his New York identity was either irrelevant to them or a strong selling point.
"I think it's great," James Jacobs, a retired Portsmouth Naval Shipyard worker, said at Trump's rally in Farmington. Asked which of Trump's characteristics he identified with New York, Jacobs grinned before replying, "His hair."
Tom Casavant, a production supervisor at a plastics manufacturing company, said Trump struck him as a decidedly New York type of guy, in a good way.
"Straight up, this is the way it is: You either like it or you don't," he said, summarizing Trump's attitude. "That's a good draw. I respect that."