With polls closed and election officials counting results, exit polling indicates that Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is holding a large lead over his Democratic opponents in the New York mayoral primary – but he may still end up in a runoff against former Comptroller Bill Thompson or City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
It isn’t clear whether de Blasio will win the 40 percent of votes to avoid a runoff. If he doesn’t hit that mark, the competition for the second runoff spot is tight.
The exit polls were conducted by Edison Research/Marist.
On the Republican side, former MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota is facing off against John Catsimatidis.
In the campaign for city comptroller, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is leading former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, but the race is too close to call, according to exit polls.
The public advocate race is looking like a battle between City Councilwoman Letitia James and State Sen. Daniel Squadron, the exit polls indicate.
The final word on winners -- or whether there will be runoffs -- may still take a while, due in part to widespread reports of problems with the city’s 1960s-era lever-operated voting machines, rushed back into use after the Board of Elections warned they couldn’t certify results from the city’s new electronic machines in time for a runoff.
All over the city, voters reported encountering jammed or broken machines, causing longer lines at the working machines, and forcing many people to have to fill out paper ballots. The reliance on paper ballots has heightened concerns that every vote gets counted, which could lead to a long wait for results.
Lhota was among those who had to vote by pen and paper, at his voting place, Congregation of Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights.
“It may be a long night based on the fact that, at least in my election district, the machines weren’t working,” Lhota told reporters.
Of the 3 million or so registered Democrats, less than a third were expected to cast ballots. There are fewer than 500,000 registered Republicans in the city, but a small fraction, maybe a tenth, are expected to vote in the primary.
This year is arguably the Democrats' best shot in decades to take the mayor's office from the GOP, which has won each of the last five elections. Bloomberg switched from the GOP to an independent while in office.
Primary day arrived with de Blasio completing a steady, summer-long rise from the middle of the pack, portraying himself as the most progressive of the candidates and pounding at the city’s economic inequalities and offering the cleanest break from the policies – particularly stop and frisk -- of three-term Mayor Bloomberg. He also benefited from campaign advertisements that featured his black wife and mixed-race children, notably his teenage Afro-wearing son, Dante.
De Blasio’s surge left Quinn, the one-time front-runner, fighting for her political life. Aiming to be the first openly gay mayor, and the first woman to hold the office, Quinn is the most politically powerful of the candidates. She said Tuesday that she was confident she’d make a runoff.
She is the one responsible for making council deals and negotiating with Bloomberg, but that record has dogged her for much of the campaign. De Blasio accused her of making backroom deals with the mayor, and for backing his bid to change city law to allow him to run for a third term. Quinn pointed out that de Blasio, as a council candidate, once spoke in favor of overturning term limits, but that argument did not seem to hold much traction. It is as if she is burdened with many of the negatives associated with the sitting mayor, and little of the positives.
Post-vote surveys provided some insight into that divide. Only 22 percent of Democrats told an Edison Research/Marist exit poll that they wanted a candidate who would continue Bloomberg’s policies, while 73 percent said they wanted the next mayor to move the city in a different direction. The survey included more than 1,700 voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Asked to choose what issue mattered most to them in deciding who should be mayor, 30 percent said jobs and unemployment, 20 percent said education, 16 percent said crime, 12 percent said the city’s finances and 11 percent said housing.
Thompson, who won the Democratic primary in 2009 before narrowly losing to Bloomberg, has run a cautious but steady campaign, remaining in second or third place for most of the race. The race's only black candidate, Thompson spent primary day wrapping up another of his 24-hour campaign marathons, which ended with his proclamation that he felt “energized.”
The primary could turn out to be the end of former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner’s political career. Weiner has longed for the mayor’s office, and has been derailed twice before, in 2005 and 2009. In 2011, he resigned from Congress amid revelations that he’d sexted with women, but chose the 2013 mayoral primary to try for redemption.
Weiner enjoyed an early spike in the polls, and sparked an avalanche of late-night talk-show jokes. Then things turned dark again, when he was forced to admit that he’d continued online relationships with women after his resignation. He’s been near the cellar ever since.
The only major Democratic candidate to consistently poll worse than Weiner is Comptroller John Liu, who has been dogged by a federal investigation into fundraising improprieties.
De Blasio, the one candidate who seems in a position to potentially win the primary outright, said he wasn’t expecting that to happen. To assume otherwise would be folly, he said.
That was why, he said, he’d be up and campaigning again on Wednesday.