New York City turns to the left: de Blasio elected mayor in a landslide

Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor last Tuesday. The city seemed to be saying in its vote, “Enough is enough” after 12 years of the autocratic Michael Bloomberg and honcho Ray Kelly’s “stop and frisk” police force.

De Blasio’s victory stretched from the working-class precincts of central Brooklyn to the suburban streets of southeast Queens, signaling a forceful heave-ho of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades—a sharp turn to the left for the nation’s largest metropolis.

De Blasio, the city’s public advocate, defeated the grim, bespectacled Joseph J. Lhota, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, former deputy mayor for Rudy Giuliani, and a onetime Wall Street banker, by a margin of about 49 percentage points, with 99 percent of the vote counted.

It was the most sweeping victory in a mayor’s race since 1985, when Edward I. Koch won by 68 points, and it gave de Blasio what he said was “An unmistakable mandate to pursue his liberal agenda.”

“My fellow New Yorkers, today, you spoke out loudly and clearly for a new direction for our city,” De Blasio, a 52-year-old Democrat, said at a raucous party in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at which his teenage children danced onstage and the candidate greeted the crowd in English, Spanish and even a few words of Italian. “Make no mistake: The people of this city have chosen a progressive path, and tonight we set forth on it, together.” Oh, what a relief it is.

In Manhattan, Lhota, a 59-year-old Republican, quieted boos from his disappointed supporters as he conceded the race from behind a wooden lectern at a hotel in Murray Hill. “I wish the outcome had been different,” he said. He struck a defiant tone, mocking de Blasio’s campaign slogan, “A tale of two cities,” by quipping, “Despite what you might have heard, we are one city,” and adding, “I do hope the mayor-elect understands this, before it’s too late.” Hopefully, this will be Lhota’s last chance at getting in the last word.

The lopsided outcome announced the triumph of a populist message over a formidable résumé in a campaign that became a referendum on an entire era, starting with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and ending with the three-term incumbent mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg.

Throughout the race, de Blasio overshadowed his opponent by channeling New Yorkers’ rising frustrations with income inequality, aggressive policing tactics and lack of affordable housing and daycare, and declaring that the ever-improving city need not leave so many behind.

To an unusual degree, he relied on his own biracial family to connect with an increasingly diverse electorate, electrifying voters with a television commercial featuring his charismatic 15-year-old son, Dante, who has a towering Afro. De Blasio’s wife is African-American. He has one daughter as well.

In interviews on Election Day, voters across the five boroughs said his message had captured their deep-seated grievances and yearning for change.

Darrian Smith, a 48-year-old custodian at a public school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, said his vote for de Blasio was a plea to end the widespread police searches, known as the stop-and-frisk tactic, that have repeatedly ensnared him and his African-American neighbors.

“When I look at Mr. de Blasio, I see a bright light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

Jon Kopita, an educational consultant from Greenwich Village, called de Blasio the best hope for slowing the growth of luxury condominiums that crowd his Manhattan neighborhood.

“If it just becomes a rich person’s city, then I might as well just go live somewhere else,” he said. “It’s time to go in a different direction.”

The traditional Republican Party playbook that had propelled Giuliani and Bloomberg to victory in an overwhelmingly Democratic city—reaching across party lines to voters worried about crime, education and quality of life—felt outdated this campaign season.

Mr. De Blasio will become the first Democrat to lead New York in a generation, ending his party’s two-decade-long exile from City Hall. Hopefully the liberal tone and actions of this campaign and its results will spread far beyond the city limits.

“It’s huge,” said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York, who added that de Blasio had shown that Democrats were again willing to entrust City Hall to one of their own.

“Liberalism,” Mr. Mollenkopf said, “is not dead in New York City.” Bravo!

Lhota had entered the race with great fanfare and promise. As a moderate Republican, a battle-tested manager and an outsize personality, he is known for quoting “The Godfather” and posting tipsy messages on Twitter, which speaks for itself.

But the first-time candidate proved listless on the stump, prone to a monotone delivery. His attacks on de Blasio, as a “socialist” who would invite a return to crime-riddled streets, had a shrill quality. And despite his deep ties to the business world, he struggled to persuade donors to take a chance on him in the face of daunting poll numbers.

In the end, he raised just $3.4 million, a third of the amount collected by de Blasio. “He just hit a brick wall,” said Phil Ragusa, the chairman of the Republican Party in Queens. “You have to be well funded. That is a reality. Joe was not.”

Lhota’s most ardent supporters conceded that he had failed to make a convincing case for himself. “He just wasn’t compelling enough,” said Regina Kessler, 58, who lives on the Upper East Side.

Raised a Boston Red Sox fan in Massachusetts, de Blasio embraced the cause of leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua as a young man, married a woman who once identified as lesbian, and has never managed an organization larger than 300 people.

But de Blasio, a longtime political operative who ran campaigns for Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles B. Rangel, oversaw a highly disciplined political machine that committed few errors and took little for granted, in stark contrast with Lhota.

On Election Day, de Blasio had amassed around 10,000 volunteers at 40 locations to turn out voters; Lhota recruited about 500 workers at nine locations.

The coordinated outreach paid off, with de Blasio capturing majority support from voters of all races, genders, ages, religions, incomes and education levels, according to exit polls by Edison Research.

Largely overlooked last Tuesday was the man who has dominated the city for the past 12 years and whose legacy was a divisive theme of the campaign: Mayor Bloomberg.

He quietly cast his vote at an Upper East Side school, amid reminders that his time at the pinnacle of municipal power was drawing to a close. When Bloomberg, dressed in a crimson tie and a crisp winter coat, showed up, unfortunately a poll worker asked the question, “What was his first name again?”

As he left, clutching a loaf of banana bread and a plastic cup of coffee (not more than sixteen ounces in keeping with his soda prohibition), a little boy waved at his king-size SUV and yelled, “Bye, bye, mayor!”

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.