One of Matt's commenters asks, in re Rudy:
Why do New Yorkers keep voting Republican? I don't care if they think it's cute-- they keep saddling us with awful ex-mayors who see it as a launching pad for national office. Enough. Vote for a greasy dem who's satisfied with a little graft and a few laughs and stop saddling us with egomaniacal, semi-authoritarian dweebs!
They vote Republican because the whole city is Democratic.
Let me explain.
For most offices, like city council, the Democratic primaries decide the election. That means that there are a lot of extremely powerful interest groups with very powerful electoral machines invested in the primaries. And they are far to the left of both America, and most of New York, which is why City Council meetings tend to sound like the forlorn remnants of a Socialist Worker's Reading Group.
These groups tend to nominate mayoral candidates who are a) fairly far to the left and b) extremely noticeably in hoc to many small interest groups who are not popular with most of the voters. However, a mayoral race is high profile enough that all the people who normally just reflexively vote Democratic will actually know something about the candidate. Like, for example, his name. And what makes the candidate popular with the interest groups almost definitionally makes them unpopular with the broad electorate.
The Republicans, meanwhile, nominate socially moderate, and somewhat fiscally conservative candidates who resonate with the majority of New Yorkers who are not members of a government union or activist group. Hence, Rudy and Mike.
Term limits, it should be noted, have made the problem worse; with the professional pols out, the little interest groups have grown noticeably in power. So New York may be facing Republican mayors for some time to come.
Except Mayor Mike was a lifelong Democrat who only switched parties to avoid the Dem primaries, and is now an Independent, just to begin to explain why your explanation is glib and mostly wrong.
No, Bloomberg actually fits with it. I'd argue that the NYC Democratic party is not actually to the left of the NYC electorate, but I would agree that their nominating process is all screwed up by the 'one party town' factor.
I've never been to NYC and I don't especially follow Big Apple politics, so I couldn't say if your analysis is correct. Seems plausible. But you've almost perfectly also described the state of Democratic Politics in California. Case in point: last year there were two major contenders for Governor. One was a politically talented statewide officeholder who ran, more or less, as someone unburdened to special interests and as a candidate with some interesting ideas (I had never heard of a candidate offering universal community college before, but he made some pretty good arguments for it). On the other hand, you had the hard-core liberal candidate who had zero charisma, looked vaguely cartoonish, and was in hock to virtually every left-leaning organization in the state. Candidate B, Phil Angelides, narrowly won the nomination and was soundly defeated by "gone goose" Arnold Schwarzenegger. Candidate A, Steve Westly, would have beaten Arnie in a landslide, in my opinion.
This is why only three Democrats in the past fifty years have governed this state, and one of those got recalled. I'm pro-union, pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-education--I'm what would be considered liberal by the standards of our time. And the groups that effectively run the state scare me. They are anti-progressive in a very literal sense, and they are interested only in achieving their very narrow objectives to get more people to donate to them. And they are so powerful that no serious Democrat can get elected without them. I would love to have an independent-minded, reform-oriented governor like Steve Westly. Unfortunately, my only option to get that in this state is to vote Republican, again and again. And so I do.
Except Mayor Mike was a lifelong Democrat who only switched parties to avoid the Dem primaries, and is now an Independent, just to begin to explain why your explanation is glib and mostly wrong.
You missed the point of the post. The Democratic Party in NYC are composed in large part of a bunch a left-wing interest groups (the Sharptons of the world, etc.). They tend to nominate candidates who shill for the interest groups. And because they shill for the interest groups, the candidates are not popular with the broad electorate.
Mayor Mike, while registered as a Democrat, would never have been nominated for mayor as a Democrat, because he isn't a shill for the interest groups. He won, and he's popular, because he isn't a shill for the interest groups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_New_York_City
Since 1898 there have been 12 Democratic mayors (not including John Lindsay who switched parties in the midst of his terms), 6 Republicans (including the aforementioned Lindsay and also Bloomberg, even though he has recently walked from the Repubs.), and one "Fusion" party mayor. Go figure. And the Republicans included such conservative stalwarts as Bloomberg, Lindsay, and Fiorello LaGuardia. [/snark] One might think, from a quick view of history, that Giuliani was the exception, not the rule. But that would require a quick view of history instead of glib truthiness designed to make a cheap political point.
But Glib Truthiness is a Feature, not a Bug (although jonathan might rightly be bugged by the sad state of affairs at this blog). With Mi Familia on the Long Island Shores, I have noted that a lot of NYC voters -- we're talking the 5 boroughs -- are more conservative than you might think. Not exactly Re-thug-lican glibertarians like our hostest with the mostest, but close enough to vote that way...
New Yorkers are voting for "moderate" GOP mayors - or at least men who present themselves as moderates - for the same reason Massachusetts has had a recent history of electing "moderate" GOP governors. The voters don't mind a counterbalance to the overwhelming Dem lean of the respective overall governments. They also know the executive is basically weak in both cases - more so in Massachusetts, but it still applies in NYC.
It's funny how swiftly Rudy and Mitt zoomed over to the wacky right as soon as they left their old jobs, isn't it? They should have a steel cage death match to determine who is the bigger phony.
Your bold experiment with American spelling is proving very exciting: "in hoc".
Hock, not hoc. Lets not get so caught up in the details of life, the universe, and everything, that we forget the supreme good of language quibbles.
I see I've been out-pedanted. Curse you, Apprentice, you've foiled me again.
Al is clearly right about Bloomberg's party switch. But putting that aside, I think Ferrer was the last gasp of that particular party machine; I'll be surprised if the next mayor isn't a Democrat.
"It's funny how swiftly Rudy and Mitt zoomed over to the wacky right as soon as they left their old jobs, isn't it? They should have a steel cage death match to determine who is the bigger phony."
I agree about the phoniness, but if you think their present positions are "wacky right", you have no idea about the right at all. In most of the country, Guiliani, Romney, Bloomberg, and Schwarzenegger would just be the kind of Democrat that stands a good chance of winning the general election. Only in big cities and a few deep-blue states would they have to become Republicans to get past the primaries.
The number of shockingly ignorant leftists with no ability to debate or understand logic is depressing. Ditch the watery magazine and beg the London newspaper (weekly, on shiny paper that likes magazine drag) to take you back. These people are dragging you down.
Markm,
The present 'wacky right' positions of Gulliani and Romney are far to the right of the ones they took when they we're elected.
You are basically correct, their prior positions are mainstream democratic positions, as are Blommberg's and Arnolds. The reasons republicans with essentially dmeoctratic positions won in NYC, MA and CA is mostly about unique conditions in each of those places, not a democratic base that is signififcantly to the left of most democrats in the country. I would imagine issue polls in say Wisconsin or Michigan would find Dems there agreeing with Dems in CA or MA on the vast majority of issues.
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