HOW DEBLASIO WON: The Commercial Only Tells Part o/t Story

A pivotal campaign commercial featured Mr. de Blasio and his son, Dante.

N.Y. TIMES:

From the start, Mr. de Blasio understood the perils of running an anti-establishment campaign against a capable and generally well-regarded incumbent: In large numbers, Democrats in New York approved of the job that Mr. Bloomberg was doing, and thought the city was on the right track.

 

....[But] After 12 years of any mayor, they reasoned, the electorate craved something fundamentally different in substance and style. A survey conducted in the fall of 2012 by the de Blasio campaign’s pollster put hard numbers behind the theory: a slight majority of Democrats wanted a change in direction in the mayor’s office.       

Even some who approved of Mr. Bloomberg, the pollster found, felt oddly disconnected with him, believing that he had emphasized his own pet issues — soda sizes, bike lanes, pedestrian plazas — rather than the real-life worries that filled their days.

“A vanity mayor,” the de Blasio campaign called him.

 

The problem was that few Democrats knew much of anything about Mr. de Blasio. His position as the city’s public advocate was low-wattage, his personality could seem professorial....

 

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...when the commercial was finally shown to the candidate and his wife, they seemed overcome, instantly recognizing the power of its message: that the aggressive policing of the Bloomberg era was not an abstraction to Mr. de Blasio, it was an urgent personal worry within his biracial household.

“This,” predicted the campaign’s pollster, Anna Greenberg, “will be huge.”

 

The ad exploded, transforming the fortunes of a fourth-place campaign and confirming the convictions of a long-shot politician who had banked his candidacy on a series of big bets: that a relentless critique of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic would resonate with white New Yorkers, not scare them off; that in a city of tribal politics an Italian-American could win the hearts of black voters; that a tired-seeming message about a tale of two cities would stir those people still hurting after a traumatic economic recession; and, most of all, that there was far greater unhappiness with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg than polls had registered or Mr. de Blasio’s rivals had realized.

 

 

 

It marked a crucial moment for Mr. de Blasio: he had begun to assert ownership over the volatile issue of the stop-and-frisk tactic, which Mr. de Blasio’s aides knew from focus groups was roiling the city’s African-American neighborhoods.       

They expected a fierce battle with Mr. Thompson, a former city comptroller, over who would be the most fervent opponent of the practice and became increasingly puzzled throughout the summer when the fight never materialized. Instead of calling for an end to the tactic, Mr. Thompson refused to support two City Council bills cracking down on the Police Department and scored the endorsement of unions representing law enforcement officers in the process.

“We were floored,” recalled a top adviser to Mr. de Blasio.

Suddenly, the black vote seemed to be up for grabs and the de Blasio campaign moved aggressively to exploit the opening. The political establishment took it for granted that Mr. Sharpton, a friend of Mr. Thompson’s since their youth and a cheerleader for his rise through the city’s black power structure, would endorse his Harlem neighbor.

But Mr. de Blasio, who had long courted Mr. Sharpton, attending his rallies and flattering him by soliciting his advice, now deployed his team to block Mr. Thompson’s path, seeking to snatch the endorsement for himself.

 

photo by David Shankbone

 Mr. Sharpton, it turned out, needed little nudging to turn on Mr. Thompson. He was privately furious over Mr. Thompson’s opposition to the two Council bills, asking a friend, “What kind of a campaign is he running?”       

Thompson aides reassured themselves that Mr. Sharpton would eventually come around.

Then, days after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Mr. Thompson got a call: Mr. Sharpton could not grant his blessing, and would stay out of the race entirely. Mr. Thompson was crestfallen. He asked Mr. Sharpton to reconsider.

“I can’t reconsider what I believe in,” Mr. Sharpton responded.

 

Mr. de Blasio also got lucky: One by one, his opponents stumbled. ...Mr. Weiner, of course, saw his candidacy collapse amid bizarre new revelations about his online behavior. Christine C. Quinn pursued a message of upbeat continuity, not to end the Bloomberg era but to improve it, never grappling with the still raw feelings toward the mayor and the term limits extension she helped engineer for him.