For a breed that has long been written off for dead, Northeastern Republicans sure have been having a strong run of it recently. There are plenty of other comments to make about the selection by President Bush of a New Yorker, Michael Mukasey, as his nominee for attorney general. But one of them is that it torpedoes the idea that Mr. Bush would staff the administration with a bunch of Texans and neglect the Northeast. Not only is Mr. Mukasey a New Yorker, but Mr. Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, was living in New York while chief executive of Goldman Sachs before joining the administration.

The secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, was a longtime federal prosecutor in New Jersey. One of Mr. Bush’s Supreme Court picks was Samuel Alito of New Jersey. And lest one think that the trend will end with the departure of President Bush — who despite his Texas governorship has strong family ties to both Maine and Connecticut — from the White House, consider that the two leading candidates in the Republican primary in 2008, Fred Thompson notwithstanding, are Mayor Giuliani of New York and Governor Romney of Massachusetts.

We wouldn’t want to make too much of this trend. The congressional delegations from the Northeast are still overwhelmingly Democratic, and the Republicans still count their electoral base as the South and the West. But we wouldn’t want to make too little of it either. To the extent that it shows that the Republicans haven’t entirely written off the region that includes this newspaper’s home, we take it as an encouraging sign, particularly because the interests of New Yorkers of all ideological backgrounds are better served by having the major political parties competing for their allegiance rather than taking them for granted.