National GOP Should Realize the New York City Mayoral Race Does Matter

Since the mayoral race started nearly a year and a half ago ago, Republicans have looked for an excuse not to win. Anyone who’s gone to an “experts” panel has heard that with New York’s six-to-one voter registration in favor of Democrats, a Republican can’t win unless there’s a crisis. The crisis for Republicans, then, is that there is no crisis. But the GOP lets itself off the hook too easily. The Republicans’ looming loss isn’t somebody else’s fault—but it is a sign of the party’s national difficulties.

New Yorkers often hear from sages how hard it is for a non-Democrat to win the city. The only fair reading of recent history shows the opposite. New York hasn’t elected a Democratic mayor in 20 years. If you’re 38 and have lived in the city your whole life, you’ve never voted for a winning Democratic mayor. (Mayor Mike Bloomberg ran three times as a Republican despite switching his personal registration to independent in 2007.)

It does the voters a disservice to blame crises for voters’ fair-mindedness. Mayor Rudy Giuliani won re-election in 1997 after having cut the number of murders by 49.5 percent. Bloomberg won a third term a year after Lehman Brothers had collapsed.

Giuliani and Bloomberg won once and again for a good reason. Each man was the better candidate than his opponent. Whom would you have preferred to have serve as mayor, out of the following: Mayor David Dinkins (again, 1993), then Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger (1997), then Public Advocate Mark Green (2001), then Bronx Borough President Freddy Ferrer (2005), or then Comptroller Bill Thompson (2009)?

None of the above presented a case why he or she would be better than his opponents. The voters were smart enough to figure it out.

This time around, it’s hard to make a case that the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, has made a better argument for himself than has Bill de Blasio, the Democratic public advocate and front-runner by far.

True, de Blasio is a weak candidate running on superficial ideas. And he has benefited from good luck. Many voters strongly disliked City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the conventional-wisdom victor.

But part of de Blasio’s good luck is that Lhota has run a lackluster campaign.

Lhota looked terrific on paper. He ran the city under Giuliani, and as MTA chief he did a bang-up job in getting the transportation authority running after Superstorm Sandy. And he has a great personality that often came across publicly during his MTA tenure. Not that winsomeness is a prerequisite; people always complain about Bloom-berg’s alleged coldness.

But Lhota has run on two platforms: fear of crime and demand for tax cuts. He seems to think people will automatically be so terrified of Dinkins-era crime rates that they won’t vote for a Democrat when reminded of this terrible history. But most voters were not living in New York, at least as adults, when Dinkins was mayor. Nor does Lhota realize that voters aren’t exactly clamoring for, say, a cut in the hotel tax.

That young people and newcomers don’t remember high crime and that people don’t view corporate tax cuts as a priority isn’t an excuse for Lhota. It was a reason for him to do better.

He needed ideas—any ideas. He could have seized on Bloomberg’s inattention to quality-of-life issues like illegal construction and noise. He could have pushed for a better NYPD website so that people could look up, via a real-time map, why they or their children were stopped. He could have pushed for neighborhood-based pre-K, saying he’d work with landlords on using empty retail space for preschools so that no 4-year-old would have to take a bus. He could have seized on de Blasio’s flip-flopping on the Times Square pedestrian plaza.

Sure, Republicans’ toxic national reputation hurts Lhota, too, more than it hurt Giuliani.

But that’s not an excuse, either. That’s a reason for Republicans to do better. Voters under 40 don’t associate Republicans with Ronald Reagan and growth. They associate Republicans with George W. Bush, a decadelong war and financial crisis.

When Lhota—absent a shocking upset—loses, Republicans should care. New York isn’t an outlier. The rest of the country is looking more like New York. If Republicans can’t make it here…

Nicole Gelinas (@nicolegelinas on Twitter) is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.