On the eve of the midterm election, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stood before a Brooklyn crowd and laid out exactly how she planned to spend the state's incoming political capital.

"I cannot wait when I call up Hakeem Jeffries and say, 'Mr. Speaker, I kind of need a few more billions of dollars for New York,'" she said at a rally in Williamsburg, according to THE CITY. "Then I call Chuck Schumer: 'Mr. Majority Leader, I need a few more billions of dollars for New York State.' Get used to it, America. Because we're in charge."

Less than 24 hours later, Democrats won both chambers of Congress. If Jeffries and Schumer win their leadership votes when the new Congress convenes in January, two Brooklynites will lead Capitol Hill opposite a Queens-born president. For the first time in U.S. history, sons of New York are poised to run both chambers of Congress and the White House at the same time. The House speaker is elected by a majority vote of the full chamber on the floor—a process that in recent memory has stretched to multiple ballots—while the Senate majority leader is chosen by the majority party's sitting senators.

Hochul returned to the theme on election night: "Can you imagine New York state having both leaders of both bodies in Congress? Everybody's going to want to move to New York because we're the political club of the nation," per Crain's reporter Jack Grieve. "Imagine a world where I actually have a Congress, a House and a Senate, that are not fighting me, but working as partners to deliver even more for New York."

A remarkably compact map

The three men at the apex of federal power grew up within roughly 11 miles of one another: President Donald Trump in Jamaica Estates, Queens, and Schumer and Jeffries just a few miles apart in Brooklyn, in Midwood and Crown Heights, respectively.

The last time the House and Senate were led by people from the same state was when Texans Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson held the top jobs, an overlap that ended in 1961, when Johnson left the Senate to become vice president. Jeffries would add milestones of his own: the first House speaker from New York state in nearly 160 years, the first from New York City, and the first Black speaker. The speaker also stands second in the line of succession to the presidency, behind only the vice president.

New York has come close before. In 2018, after Schumer became Senate minority leader, Queens Democrat Joe Crowley was the House's fourth-ranking Democrat and a likely successor to Nancy Pelosi. He also chaired what City & State called arguably the most powerful county committee in the state. Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated him in a primary, and Jeffries succeeded Crowley as chair of the House Democratic Caucus—the post that set him on the path to the speakership.

New York's reach in Washington extends well beyond Congress. Two of the nine Supreme Court justices were born in New York City: Sonia Sotomayor in the Bronx and Elena Kagan in Manhattan. Outside of Gotham, Chief Justice John Roberts was born in Buffalo, and Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, who took over the central bank in May, was born in Albany.

The question now is what the Big Apple and the Empire State can reap from this moment of outer-borough ascendance. Will it play out the way Brooklyn's own Biggie described in his 1994 classic "Juicy," with the two chambers of Congress getting to "Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way"? Or, as Queens-bred 50 Cent put it, will the president tell them that he—and potential but improbable White House spokesperson Nicki Minaj—is "from Queens where we are taught to handle beef on our own"?

New York 'will get its fair share'

Setting politics aside, the agenda for city officials is largely about infrastructure.

At the top of the wish list is Gateway, the $16 billion rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Its centerpiece, a new tunnel beneath the river, would be the first new passenger rail crossing under the Hudson in more than a century, supplementing tunnels that opened in 1910 and were flooded during Hurricane Sandy. The project dates to 2004 and survived New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's cancellation of an earlier version in 2010. Just last fall, during the government shutdown, Trump froze its funding. "It's billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get—it's terminated," he wrote on Truth Social. He later suggested he would restore the money if Penn Station and Dulles International Airport were renamed for him. This past July, a federal judge permanently blocked the freeze.

Also on the list is Sunnyside Yard, a plan to build 12,000 homes over a Queens rail yard that the mayor's office says would require more than $21 billion in federal grants. When Trump visited Gracie Mansion in September—the first visit by a sitting president in decades—he and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, another Queens native, discussed the project. Trump said he had been watching the site for 35 years; in the 1980s, he floated building an arena there for his New Jersey Generals football team. "You're going to need a lot of federal approvals and probably some federal money to do it," he told Mamdani in front of reporters, before suggesting he would be open to providing the city with the funds.

New Yorkers are also seeking funding for the Second Avenue subway extension, which would push the line into East Harlem, along with relief for the more than 20,000 people affected by changes to SNAP, the federal food-assistance program, and the more than 400,000 facing changes to Medicaid. Following Tuesday's election results, Rep. Gregory Meeks of Queens predicted New York "will get its fair share," per NY1. Even Mamdani, who appears to have gained favor with the president, said after the midterms that having leaders "from our city and of our city" is "of incredible importance."

A far cry from 'Drop Dead'

New York knows what it is like to lose in Washington. During the city's 1975 fiscal crisis, the New York Daily News distilled the federal response in a famous headline: "Ford to City: Drop Dead." President Gerald Ford later signed legislation extending federal loan assistance to the city.

After Hurricane Sandy, the state's congressional delegation sought about $60 billion in federal aid; after a very public clash between Ted Cruz and Schumer, it was offered just a little more than $27 billion. (Schumer, for his part, years later approved the funds Cruz requested for Texas following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey.)

"It definitely would have been different if New Yorkers had been in charge," Pete King, then a Republican congressman from Long Island, told the New York Times. "If you have to have Democrats in charge, as a New Yorker it's better to have Schumer and Jeffries."

What happens next remains to be seen, but New York has plenty of muscle beyond Trump, Schumer, and Jeffries. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin is a former Long Island congressman; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand leads the Democratic Party's Senate campaign arm; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the Bronx and Queens, is weighing a 2028 presidential run or a Senate bid.

Perhaps they will do what Ja Rule suggested in his 2004 song and tell the rest of the country: "We from New York."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.