Council Watch By SETH BARRON
POST-MORTEM FOR A PREDICTABLE ELECTION
New York City Councilman Eric Ulrich, who will be one of only three Republicans in the Council next year, was re-elected with 53.1 percent of the vote.
E
lection Day in New York City delivered no major surprises, but there are intriguing stories to be winkled out of the details. Bill de Blasio scored an astounding victory, crushing his opponent by nearly 50 points and winning three out of every four votes cast. Yet we can easily overstate the mayor-elect’s mandate if we overlook the fact that voter turnout was down substantially from elections past. In fact, preliminary results indicate that barely 1 million people voted, by far the lowest total in the history of mayoral elections since women got the vote in 1917, which doubled the electorate. Voter turnout in 2013 was less than one in four, easily setting a new record for voter apathy in New York City. So while the de Blasio machine was able to pull out its hard-core voters, his approximately 750,000 votes match what Michael Bloomberg got in both 2001 and 2005. Not to gainsay the de Blasio accom32 NOVEMBER 18, 2013 | cityandstateny.com
plishment of winning so lopsidedly, but heavily skewed, low-turnout elections are hardly what we envision when we think of vibrantly democratic societies. Given the unbalanced nature of the city’s political makeup, it seems that it would make sense to introduce nonpartisan voting in New York’s municipal elections. Certainly the unions and Democratic Party regulars would lose out, but the candidates would be forced to differentiate themselves on issues rather than the degree of their fealty to the machine. Of course, it is a sad paradox of power that just when things get so bad that we need nonpartisan elections, the entrenched party is powerful enough to make sure that we never get them. In the city’s Council races, all the incumbents won, though there were some close shaves. Councilman Eric Ulrich of Ozone Park, who will be the only non– Staten Island Republican in the Council, had unexpectedly tough opposition from
Lew Simon, who had been considered a weak candidate and whose campaign was disrupted a month out by his having to undergo bypass surgery. Ulrich won by a narrow 6 point margin, whereas in 2009 he prevailed by a much more comfortable 58 percent of the vote. Simon received substantial financial support from supermarket behemoth and failed Republican mayoral hopeful John Catsimatidis, who was angry that Ulrich had insulted his candidacy. More significantly, Simon is a longtime district leader for Assembly District 23 and comes from the Republican-leaning Rockaways, where he appears to have eaten into some of Ulrich’s base of support. Whatever the reason, Ulrich’s thin margin of victory highlights a key problem with his political future: Where does a talented Republican go in city politics? Young, bright and popular, Ulrich may already have hit his ceiling. Slightly to the northwest of Ozone Park, in Maspeth, Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley also saw her 2009 margin of victory shrink somewhat this year. Crowley, who faced a vigorous campaigner in Craig Caruana, represents a conservative enclave in central Queens that came out substantially for Lhota. It seems likely that the pro-Lhota Middle Village vote bled off some of her 2009 margin, though she did win nevertheless by a comfortable 18 points. Clearly the Crowley name continues to carry weight in Queens County. Further east in Council District 19, Paul Vallone’s famous surname helped him close out a rough electoral season. The Vallone family’s power base is Astoria, but it still appears to have translated into votes in Bayside, where the newest-elected Vallone, with substantial assistance from REBNY’s war chest, beat a tough primary field and a competitive opponent in the general as well. REBNY’s Jobs for New York PAC poured more than $360,000 into independent expenditures to elect Vallone, who styled himself as the conservative, pro-business Democrat among the crowd jostling to replace Councilman Dan Halloran. The 19th CD tends to vote eccentrically: Tony Avella, a maverick in the state Senate, who previously engendered consternation in his colleagues when he served in the Council, preceded Halloran. The primary battle turned into a
Vallone pile-on, as each candidate outdid the others to condemn the front-runner as a hack, a real estate lackey, a carpetbagger and so on. The general election saw a number of crossovers in this strangely antipartisan district: Paul Graziano, an Avella protégé, endorsed the Republican nominee, Dennis Saffran, while Halloran came out for Vallone. Vallone’s victory is a small counterweight to the supposedly progressive tilt of the Council, and he will surely be part of the Queens-based non– Progressive Caucus cohort that appears to be taking shape. In Bay Ridge Councilman Vincent Gentile trounced his opponent, John Quaglione, in the latest proxy battle between Gentile and state Sen. Martin Golden. Golden, it may be remembered, challenged Gentile for his Senate seat in 2002 and defeated the incumbent; Gentile then won the race to take over Golden’s vacated Council seat. Quaglione, a Golden aide, ran against Gentile on the not inaccurate grounds that Gentile, because he was hated by Speaker Quinn, had failed the district by not bringing home sufficient discretionary dollars. Gentile, to his credit, countered that his independence from Quinn’s spoils system indicated his sturdiness of character and spirit. In the end, Gentile took 63 percent of the vote to win decisively. Elsewhere in the city we saw oncefavored front-runners reduced to running on secondary ballot lines. Kirsten Foy, Al Sharpton’s man in Brooklyn, was elevated in the city’s consciousness when he was manhandled by the NYPD with Councilman Jumaane Williams at the 2011 West Indian Parade. His run for Council to replace Al Vann, the onetime “Mwalimu” of Bed-Stuy, was foiled by Vann’s chosen replacement, Robert Cornegy. Foy, still on the ballot as the Working Families nominee, came in with 10 percent without mounting a general election campaign. Similarly, on the Upper West Side Assemblyman Micah Kellner, who had one been the smart money’s choice to take over Jessica Lappin’s Council seat in CD 5, continued to run on the WFP line in the general, after losing in the Democratic Primary amid the ignominy of multiple sexual harassment accusations. Kellner— whose effort to win as a third party candidate was repudiated by the WFP, which would have rescinded its line had it not been too late to do so as far as the Board of Elections was concerned—also wound up with 10 percent of the vote. Could it be that 10 percent of the electorate will vote for anyone on Line E? It will be interesting to look at the data, once the BoE has it parsed down to that level, to see how the voters broke on candidates with multiple ballot lines.
Seth Barron (@NYCCouncilWatch on Twitter) runs City Council Watch, an investigative website focusing on local New York City politics.
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