Bill De Blasio's Key To Victory: Black Voters!

 

#DeBlasioBlackVoters

BILL DE BLASIO WON BECAUSE BLACK VOTERS STRONGLY SUPPORTED HIM IN THE PRIMARY & GENERAL ELECTION

THE BLACK VOTE IS STILL POWERFUL IN AMERICA.

WE CAN'T BE REPLACED.

 

ARTICLE:   "De Blasio Victory All Over the Map"

Coalition of White Liberals, Minorities.

Democrat Bill de Blasio won the race for New York mayor Tuesday by assembling an electoral coalition of white liberals and ethnic minorities that had eluded his party for 2½ decades.

The map of areas where Mr. de Blasio won looks more like the map of how the city voted in the 2012 presidential election than of past mayoral races—though even his near-record margin of victory over Republican Joe Lhota wasn't as complete as President Barack Obama's win over Mitt Romney last year.

Mr. de Blasio, the public advocate, ran a campaign that promised a clean break from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican turned independent, but swaths of the city that overwhelmingly supported the outgoing mayor in 2009 voted for the Democrat anyway. Mr. de Blasio won strong support from blacks, Latinos and Asians while running up big margins in places where affluent white liberals live, such as brownstone Brooklyn and the West Side of Manhattan. Mr. Bloomberg carried both of those areas in 2009 when he ran against then-Comptroller Bill Thompson.

"Overall, when you compare the map of Thompson's results to [Tuesday's] map, all of the changes were key electoral pieces that signaled a break with Bloomberg's political support over the last 12 years," said Steven Romalewski, who runs the mapping service at the City University of New York's Center for Urban Research.

The shift was evident among Mr. Lhota's neighbors in Brooklyn Heights. In 2009, they overwhelmingly preferred Mr. Bloomberg. Just 29% of the voters in Mr. Lhota's election district cast ballots for Mr. Thompson in 2009. On Tuesday, though, they swung to Mr. de Blasio. Just 34% of the voters in the two blocks around Mr. Lhota's penthouse apartment voted for their neighbor.

Something similar happened in the southern section of Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Mr. de Blasio lives. Mr. Thompson won just less than half of the vote there. Mr. de Blasio won nearly 90%.

Still, Mr. de Blasio didn't succeed in sweeping the city to the same extent that Mr. Obama did last year. That suggests that at least a few voters decided to differentiate between Mr. Lhota and the national GOP, despite efforts by Democrats to tie him to a Republican Party that has become deeply unpopular in the city.

Mr. Obama won 81% of the vote in New York City in 2012—eight percentage points higher than Mr. de Blasio's percentage of the vote in this year's mayoral contest. Mr. Obama also won every borough, narrowly winning Staten Island, which was once reliably Republican. On Tuesday, Mr. Lhota won Staten Island by nine percentage points. It was the only borough he carried, but he didn't do so by nearly as much as past Republican candidates.

Mr. Bloomberg won the island by 37 points in 2009.

Some voters interviewed Tuesday said they liked Mr. Bloomberg but had grown tired of him or were Democrats who didn't see a reason to vote for Mr. Lhota.

Prakash Vhatt, a 52-year-old waiter and registered Democrat from Sunnyside, Queens, voted for Mr. Bloomberg in 2009. But he said he "wasn't convinced" by Mr. Lhota and had been turned off by the federal government shutdown, which Mr. Obama and Democrats blamed on the intransigence of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives.

"I'm a Democrat and always have been—it's worth it now," he said. "Bill is more Democrat. He's going to help. Just [take] the closing in D.C.—I'm not happy. The country is going downhill."

Paul Matsumoto, a 48-year-old legal editor and registered Democrat, voted for Mr. de Blasio in Long Island City but heaped praise on Mr. Bloomberg.

"I like Bloomberg; he was getting a little crazy in the end," he said. "But to wrangle a city as large and as wild as this when you need a big personality…you'll rarely find a mayor who can achieve that."

Source:  Wall Street Journal