Race to City Hall 2013 – November 8, 2013

De Blasio’s 73.3 percent win belies the extent of his triumph, which included hundreds of districts where he picked up more than 90 percent of the vote.

In the predominantly minority neighborhoods of central Brooklyn, southeast Queens, upper Manhattan, and the Bronx, the Democrat regularly picked up 96 or 98percent of the vote. One Queens precinct even awarded him every single one of their 349 votes.

But Republican Joe Lhota won some areas which he heavily invested in. these include large sections of the Upper East Side, parts of Midtown, huge chunks of Staten Island, and areas in Flatbush, Midwood and Marine Park.

Boro Park was nearly evenly split between the two candidates, with Lhota winning 50 percent and de Blasio taking 47 percent. Williamsburg went for de Blasio by 73 percent to Lhota’s 24 percent, mirroring the percentages in the city overall.

Lhota’s biggest win came at 15 Central Park West, a limestone palace home to Wall Street executives where a penthouse was sold last year for $88 million. The Republican won the district by a landslide, capturing 33 votes, or 84.6 percent of the total, to de Blasio’s 5 votes, a mere 12.8 percent.

Among the building’s residents is Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs.

Out of the city’s 5,369 voting precincts, 14 did not yet turn in their results. Of the third-party candidates, Independence Party’s Aldolfo Carrion received the most votes, 8,202, or 1 percent of the total vote. He was followed by Green Party candidate Anthony Gronowicz and Jack Hidary, a Sephardic tech entrepreneur.

Only 1,899 felt strongly enough that the “rent was too … high” to vote for Jimmy McMillan, but that beat Erick Salgado’s 1,853. Salgado spent Election Day on a decorated truck rolling through Boro Park, pleading for votes on his megaphone.

The candidate who received the least number of votes was Michael Dilger, whose “Every Person Can Shine Like the Sun” party inspired 54 people. Hearing of his loss, he declared, “Now it’s burger time. Yee-haa!”

Bloomberg Plans Transition to Private Life

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg took his turn in line Tuesday to vote for his successor, the poll worker at Public School 6 on the Upper East Side, Jeris Coles, had one question. What was his name again?

For Bloomberg, that moment crystallized the end of his era, when the man who set out to change the way the city does business found himself replaced 12 years later — by an historic margin — by a frequent critic who won by setting himself forth as the anti-Bloomberg.

So what’s a billionaire with seven homes around the world and a global reputation in business, finance, philanthropy and politics to do?

Since retirement is not an option, Bloomberg is getting back into the media operation he founded and which still bears his name, Bloomberg L.P. According to Capital New York, the outgoing mayor will primarily be involved in Bloomberg View, the recently opened opinion portal of the media company.

Bloomberg, sources told Capital, will both write and get big names to contribute, and his tentative title will be chairman of portal. He can be expected to focus on issues that made him famous while in office, such as public health, immigration, climate change and, not least, gun control.

Although both Bloomberg and Bloomberg L.P. refused comment, the mayor told Forbes in an interview last week that he wants to continue working on the same issues in which he is currently involved at City Hall, obviously in a private capacity.

“Look,” Bloomberg said, “I will stay involved in the cases I care about. I’m not just going to give away money. I want to actually be involved with guns and immigration and innovation and government and public health. Exactly how I don’t know.”

Bloomberg is expected to begin working at View shortly after leaving office Jan. 1, after taking his long-promised vacation — reportedly a golfing trip to Hawaii and New Zealand.

Bloomberg told Forbes, which placed him at number 29 on its “Most Powerful People” list, that other world leaders have succeeded in staying relevant after leaving office.

“You know, Bill Clinton has worked very hard to keep himself relevant and make a difference, and he has. Bill Gates has done exactly the same thing,” he said.

As for the administration official most closely identified with the mayor, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is seeking the top cyber-security job at JPMorgan Chase, according to the New York Post.

Kelly was widely expected to vacate the post he held for the past 12 years with the election of Bill de Blasio, a sharp critic of his stop-question-and-frisk policy. A widely admired official — in 2009, voters were urged to “keep Kelly on the job” by electing Bloomberg — the former Marine colonel could make a seven-figure salary in the private sector.

The banking giant’s senior security officer, Thomas Higgins, left about a month ago and has not been replaced.

Kelly has great rapport with JPMorgan’s senior leaders, in particular chief executive Jamie Dimon, who made a $4.6-million donation five years ago to the New York City Police Foundation, the private fundraising arm of the department.

Bloomberg Has Kind Words for Man Who Ran as Antagonist

Mayor Bloomberg said he plans on helping de Blasio make a smooth transition into the city’s top post over the next two months.

“Bill de Blasio and I aren’t going to agree on everything, but we certainly agree on a lot of things,” Bloomberg told CNN Wednesday. “I had a great hourlong meeting with him this morning, where he and I just … talked about how we can help and the transition. We’ve created a book for him, an electronic book, where he can look at every agency and see what’s needed.”

Bloomberg said he and de Blasio agreed to “get together periodically” over the next two months.

“Keep in mind, I have a big vested interested in making Bill de Blasio an even better mayor than I was,” he said. “The bottom line is I’m going to live in New York City.”

Bloomberg, a billionaire with a history of giving away hundreds of millions of dollars a year to charitable causes close to his heart, said that he has no plans to run for elected office again.

“Let me guarantee you two things,” he said. “Number one, I will vote, and number two, I won’t be running. In terms of something in the middle, it depends who’s running whether I want to support them, whether I want to get involved.”

Team de Blasio Never Thought Quinn, Weiner Had a Chance

Bill Hyers, the man who engineered mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s historic victory on Tuesday, said that with the rise and fall of the various candidates, they counted from the beginning on a de Blasio–Bill Thompson runoff.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn was considered the formidable front-runner for years, but her lead collapsed when former representative Anthony Weiner entered the race in the spring. All along, de Blasio and Thompson languished in the low double digits, seemingly unable to pull out of the 10-percent range.

That changed with Weiner’s implosion, when both Bills surged in the polls, ending in a primary in which the two of them were the top vote-takers — but de Blasio secured enough votes to win without a runoff.

“Bill’s rise in the polls actually, more than anything, timed with when the voters started paying attention,” said Hyers. “We always put 45 days [from the primary] on the board and said this is when we’re going to start moving. The electorate in the middle of the summer — spring, early summer — your average voter has things to do in [his] life and does not think about politics 24/7, year-round.”

Hyers said that “real movement” toward de Blasio began “about 43 days” before the Sept. 10 primary. He credited de Blasio’s arrest at a protest against a hospital closure, and the famous ad in which the candidate’s 15-year-old son Dante, sporting a stupendous afro, asked voters to support his dad for his progressive values.

“We fundamentally understood that [Weiner was not going to enter the runoff],” Hyers said. “We always were predicting that we and Bill Thompson would be the top two finishers, and it was pretty easy to see in any internal polling.”

He said that Quinn and Weiner had negatives that prevented them from rising any higher than they did.

This article appeared in print on page 1 of the November 8th, 2013 edition of Hamodia.