Several things contribute to tight Bloomberg race
Photo credit: Getty Images | Michael Bloomberg celebrates his victory for a third term as mayor of NYC Tuesday. (Nov. 3, 2009)
It looked like Mayor Michael Bloomberg was going to have a cakewalk in Tuesday's election.
Up by at least 12 percent Monday in the final opinion polls over Democratic Comptroller William Thompson, Bloomberg appeared to be a runaway winner. But his eventual margin of victory came in at just over 5 percentage points.
What made the mayoral race closer than many expected, experts said, was a combination of undecided voters breaking for Thompson and the strange effect front-runner status can sometimes have on turnout.
"Blowout polls have a self-correcting tendency," said Maurice Carroll, director of polling at Quinnipiac University.
Supporters of a candidate well out in front may decide to stay home, while those fighting for the underdog may double their efforts to vote, he said.
Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Poll, said in a blog posting Wednesday that statistics showed before the election that Democratic voters were "coming home" to Thompson.
"This trend continued through Marist's final look at the electorate on Sunday and on election eve," Miringoff said.
Carroll agreed undecided voters moved over to Thompson. The resulting 51 percent to 46 percent win for Bloomberg wasn't a squeaker, but it wasn't the blowout Bloomberg was looking for, Carroll said.
"Five points is a solid victory, but not as solid as 12 points we had over the weekend," Carroll observed.
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The result may also indicate dissatisfaction with Bloomberg on a number of fronts, particularly the term limits law that the mayor changed, Carroll said.
With unemployment running at around 10.3 percent nationally and a perception of Bloomberg as a billionaire a little out of touch with the middle class, Jonathan Bowles of the Center For An Urban Future wasn't surprised by the result.
"It's a tough climate out there for an incumbent," said Bowles, a point Bloomberg, who ran on the Republican and Independence lines, seemed to concede during his victory speech Tuesday night.
"Tuesday's electorate was motivated by economic concerns and laid the blame on the doorstep of government executives," Miringoff said. "Bloomberg narrowly escaped."
But as the mayor reiterated Wednesday, whether he won by one vote or a million, he is still getting his third term.
"We will have four years to see if he can do what he says he is going to do," Carroll said.
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