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1 October 2005

Race in the NYC Mayor's Race

A recent Marist College poll shows Mayor Michael Bloomberg with a comfortable 53-38% margin among likely voters over opponent Fernando Ferrer. Given that the Democrats have just wrapped up their primary campaign, and that Bloomberg has been blanketing the airwaves for months, this is not too surprising. What may be of more interest is that Bloomberg is leading among likely African American voters by 50-42% in the same poll.

Some months back, Ferrer got off to a rocky start in the campaign when he was quoted as saying that the police officers involved in the shooting of Amadou Diallo - an unarmed black immigrant - were "overindicted." While Ferrer, of Puerto Rican descent, was able to forge a black-Hispanic coalition four years ago to make it into a runoff with Mark Green, it seems that his early missteps may be hurting him among black voters this time around.

Bloomberg benefited from the racial tensions in the Ferrer-Green fight in 2001, during which, ironically enough, Ferrer lambasted Green for not calling the Diallo shooting a "crime." Green eventually won the nomination narrowly, but the party had a hard time uniting around him after such a divisive primary. It seems as though history may be repeating itself, but this time with Ferrer as the one in trouble. While still early, the idea that a white, Republican, billionaire mayor could capture anything close to 50% of the black vote is certainly something that bears watching.

Posted by Ian Yohai at October 1, 2005 12:22 PM