Democrats are uniting behind their candidate, Bill de Blasio (D):
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Bill de Blasio, completing a stunning political turnaround, assumed the role of standard-bearer of New York City’s Democratic Party on Monday, as his last remaining primary rival exited the mayoral race and he turned his attention to a fight against a Republican opponent with a starkly different vision.
In a coronation of sorts on the steps of City Hall, the state’s Democratic leaders, eager to retake the mayor’s office after almost two decades out of power, feted Mr. de Blasio as a bold new messenger for their party — even as they praised William C. Thompson Jr., the second-place primary finisher who had held out nearly a week before announcing his withdrawal.
“There is nothing more beautiful than Democratic unity, and thank you for it,” a beaming Mr. de Blasio said, as Mr. Thompson, his face frozen in a smile, stood behind him. - New York Times, 9/16/13
And Governor Andrew Cuomo (D. NY) is partially to thank for helping solidify de Blasio's support among Democratic voters:
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/...
Gov. Andrew Cuomo will hold an event with Bill de Blasio and Bill Thompson later this morning to help bring an end to the Democratic mayoral primary, according to multiple sources.
De Blasio won Tuesday's primary with just over 40 percent of the vote, the threshold needed to avoid a run-off with the second-place finisher, pending a count of outstanding ballots.
But Thompson refused to concede the race, pending a fuller count, and de Blasio, while collecting post-primary endorsements, has been careful not to directly push Thompson to end his call for a full and complete recanvassing. There are an estimated 5,100 mechanical voting machines and nearly 80,000 paper ballots yet to be counted.
For Cuomo, who avoided public appearances in the city during the primary, it's a bold entry that forestalls a potentially divisive run-off process, and projects his status as the central figure in the state's Democratic politics. - Capital New York, 9/16/13
And another one of de Blasio's former rivals is helping rally support:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Christine Quinn, once the frontrunner in the Democratic race for New York City mayor, endorsed her former rival, Bill de Blasio, on Tuesday during an event outside City Hall.
Quinn, at one time the clear favorite to win the Democratic nomination, dropped in the polls this summer as de Blasio rose to the top. She finished in a distant third in the primary, behind runner-up Bill Thompson.
Had she gone on to win the primary, and then the general election, Quinn would've been the first woman, and the first openly gay New Yorker, to be elected mayor of New York City. - Huffington Post, 9/17/13
Even Quinn's most dedicated supporter is now on the de Blasio train:
http://politicker.com/...
Councilman James Gennaro, once a fierce backer of Council Speaker Christine Quinn and an even fiercer critic of her old rival, Bill de Blasio, is now one of the presumptive Democratic nominee’s biggest fans.
“So the people really want change. And they want it now. And they want their agent of change to be Bill de Blasio. Period,” Mr. Gennaro, a term-limited Queens councilman, declared in a jubilant statement titled, “It’s a New Day in NYC- Congrats to de Blasio!”
“On the number one issue of change, it was a rout for de Blasio. In the overall vote count, it was a rout for de Blasio. Highest favorability rating? De Blasio. Lowest unfavorable rating? De Blasio. You get the idea,” he added. - Politicker, 9/16/13
Quinn's endorsement will be helpful for de Blasio's campaign:
http://politicker.com/...
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was the vaunted front-runner in the mayor’s race, according to the polls. It was widely assumed that former Comptroller Bill Thompson, the only black candidate in the race, would consolidate the minority vote.
But the influential healthcare workers’ union went with Mr. de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, who now stands as the all-but-assured Democratic nominee for mayor. Mr. de Blasio repaid their faith by making potential hospital closures a centerpiece of his campaign: in July, he was even arrested for protesting the closures of two Brooklyn hospitals, a move that gave him needed publicity.
Yet even as far back as June, it looked like George Gresham, president of 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers Union, had seriously miscalculated.
Mr. Gresham, 58, had hoped when he backed Mr. de Blasio early, other labor unions would follow his lead. Instead his colleagues made clear that they didn’t view Mr. de Blasio, who was once expected to rack up the lion’s share of labor endorsements and the support of the labor-backed Working Families Party, as viable in the primary.
In one grim period for Mr. de Blasio, the city’s other three most politically powerful unions–the United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ SEIU and the Hotel Trades Council–all endorsed Ms. Quinn or Mr. Thompson, dealing what appeared to be a crippling blow to the de Blasio campaign.
“I certainly was aware he didn’t start off with the type of name recognition the other candidates had,” Mr. Gresham told Politicker in a recent interview. “We started out behind the eight ball but the question became for me: ‘If we’re going to get involved, we’e going to invest our organization to really fight hard to get someone to be the next leader.’”
“The direction the city was going in was not a direction for working people,” he further explained. “If you’re born wealthy, then this is a fun place to live. But if you have to work for a living, it’s very challenging and it’s quite unfair at times. I’m excited that that perspective is going to change and make it a city for everyone.” - Politicker, 9/17/13
The Reverend Al Sharpton's also been doing his part to rally support:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
The Rev. Al Sharpton hosted Bill de Blasio at his Harlem headquarters Saturday and declared that his primary victory marks an end to old-school identity politics in the city.
“What the election showed the other night is a lot of the identity politics of 20 years ago, 30 years ago has now become identity politics of policy,” Sharpton said at the National Action Network rally.
“Bill Thompson did very well in some white areas. Bill de Blasio did very well in some black areas. You can no longer take yesterday’s map for today’s politics.
“It’s a new day,” Sharpton said. - New York Daily News, 9/14/13
And de Blasio's old friends and bosses congratulated him:
http://www.politico.com/...
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton called de Blasio, the campaign manager on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate race in New York, to congratulate him on primary night, when he finished at the 40 percent mark over his closest rival, Bill Thompson, who’s just over 26 percent.
Thompson hasn’t conceded, and says he wants every vote counted to see whether he qualifies for a runoff, which would be held Oct. 1. Democrats across the spectrum have urged him to drop out, given that de Blasio is already at the crucial 40 percent mark needed to avoid a runoff.
But according to de Blasio, the Clintons both reached out early.
“They both offered congratulations,” de Blasio said Friday, according to Capital New York. “They both offered extraordinarily helpful advice. And we left it at that. … Anything in the future has to be worked out in the future.” - Politico, 9/15/13
But lets take a moment to meet the team that helped de Blasio come from fourth place to first place. First there's Patrick Gaspard, an old friend of de Blasio's who also happens to be an ambassador to South Africa:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
They met after working together in City Hall under David Dinkins, forging a bond over a similar progressive vision and mutual family ties to the Caribbean.
Gaspard — a former top aide to President Obama — was born in the Congo to Haitian parents, and Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s wife, has roots in Barbados.
In the beginning of the campaign, when de Blasio trailed nearly all of the major candidates in the opinion polls, it was Gaspard who helped keep him focused, Nicholas Baldick, a D.C.-based political operative said.
Gaspard’s main role was of master strategist, the person de Blasio — an ex-campaign operative himself — would most likely pick up the phone and hash out problems with. - New York Daily News, 9/14/13
Then there's Bill Hyers, a veteran of Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, who runs the day-to-day operations of the campaign:
To get acquainted with the rough-and-tumble New York City politics, Hyers read up on “every campaign” he could, and obsessively watched “Koch,” the documentary about the late Mayor Ed Koch that opened in theaters the day he died.
But he also had help navigating the city from Emma Wolfe, de Blasio’s former chief of staff in the Public Advocate’s office. She was appointed Hyers’ deputy.
A former Working Families Party staffer, Wolfe had deep ties in New York’s labor and Democratic groups — not that it helped at first.
In hindsight, she thinks that was a good thing. “We really had to develop our own program,” she said. Although the commercial featuring de Blasio’s teen son Dante — who sports a huge Afro and promises his dad will end the “stop-and-frisk era” — is considered the game changer, campaign insiders also believe de Blasio’s focus on hospital closings was crucial. - New York Daily News, 9/14/13
Not to mention de Blasio's campaign was aided heavily by the young volunteers fighting for a fresh start from the Bloomberg and Giuliani days:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
This is what Republican Joe Lhota will face in November’s general election. De Blasio is a candidate who appeals to the new New York population who wasn’t even here on 9/11, who doesn’t remember the violent crack epidemic of the Dinkins administration or sleazy Times Square before Rudy Giuliani.
The de Blasio workers in Bell House on Primary Night reflected the new city, voters who know only the elitist policies of Bloomberg and the tough law-and-order tactics of NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Lhota, who wants to remind us that he was a major player in the Giuliani administration, is asking the new New Yorkers who believe in progress to go back in time to the 20th century.
Ain’t gonna happen.
The theme of this election is: “Out with the old and in with the new.”
That’s the new New York that will elect Bill de Blasio mayor. - New York Daily News, 9/15/13
With the primary officially over, de Blasio heads into the race with a big lead:
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/...
De Blasio leads Lhota 65 percent to 22 percent among likely voters, according to the NBC 4 New York/Wall Street Journal Marist poll released Tuesday. Nine percent of voters are undecided and 4 percent support either Independence Party candidate Adolfo Carrion or another contender.
The results of the survey, the first since last week's primary, suggest Lhota faces a difficult path to win over the city's voters, even though the city hasn't elected a Democratic mayor in 20 years.
De Blasio, the city's public advocate, is ahead by double-digit margins among likely voters in almost every demographic group looked at by the poll. Voters also chose de Blasio when asked which candidate could better handle a host of issues facing the city, though Lhota narrowed the gap when it came to crime prevention and handling the city's finances.
The poll also shows de Blasio winning support of 25 percent of likely Republican voters surveyed, while Lhota has 13 percent of likely Democratic voters in his corner -- a trend Lhota must reverse in order to win in New York's lopsided political landscape. Just 13 percent of likely voters with a candidate preference indicated that they might vote differently than they feel now.
"In a city where there are six Democrats for every Republican, to be successful, the Lhota campaign has to attract a lot of Democratic detractors to his side, and right now the opposite is occurring," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. "He is losing more Republicans to de Blasio than he is capturing Democrats from him.” - NBC 4 New York, 9/17/13
With de Blasio looking like a sure winner, here's a sneak peek at what to expect from him. Former police commissioner William J. Bratton is on de Blasio's shortlist to take over his old job:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
Bratton hasn’t been talking with the press since his name surfaced as a possible police commissioner under a Mayor de Blasio. But Bratton has said that if used properly, stop-and-frisk is a legitimate police tool. But he said a stop should be made only if a cop has a reasonable suspicion someone is a criminal or about to commit a crime. And a suspect should be frisked only if the cop has “fear” that the suspect might harm the officer or citizens.
Bratton says this is a much different approach than Commissioner Raymond Kelly’s policy, which he likened to troop “surges” in Iraq. Bratton has expressed interest in returning as NYPD commissioner. So de Blasio must have talked with Bratton about retraining cops who use stop-and-frisk.
Under a Mayor de Blasio, the days of racial profiling and slamming a random young man of color over a police car fender in front of his girlfriend would be over.
If the secret to Jack Maple’s passion as a cop was to treat crime victims as if they were his mother, Bratton will know that de Blasio will want every young man of color encountered by a police officer in this city to be treated as if he were the mayor’s son.
That will make for a sea change in New York policing. - New York Daily News, 9/16/13
And it looks like New Yorkers are starting to learn the de Blasio dance:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
Bill de Blasio isn’t dancing around the fact that he wants to be the next mayor of New York City.
But he has been spotted busting a move or two to celebrate his emergence as the Democratic nominee in the race.
The public advocate has made a habit of boogieing down with his family — with a series of moves unofficially dubbed “The Smackdown.”
The brief, but not-so-subtle, dance first appeared earlier this month at the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn, where de Blasio, along with his wife, Chirlane McCray, and their children, Dante and Chiara, followed acrobatic instructions provided by the candidate’s cousin, Vinny Wilhelm.
Its debut quickly made waves online, where Democratic voters, hungry for material to help them make their choice in the Sept.10 primary election, amusedly watched their eventual nominee clown around with joyful abandon.
But it wasn’t the last time de Blasio would lay down a “Smackdown.” At his Election Night victory party, where he celebrated his first-place finish with hundreds of supporters, the de Blasio family reprised the move. - New York Daily News, 9/17/13
The election is November 5th. We won the primary, now it's time to bring it home. Click here if you want to donate or help get voters out to the polls come election time:
http://www.billdeblasio.com/