Michael Bloomberg won a second term as the
mayor of New York last week, crushing his opponent by a 20-point
margin. Bloomberg's margin of victory broke the old Republican
record of 19 points set by Fiorello LaGuardia in 1937.
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Bloomberg's
landslide victory came as no surprise. The incumbent led by more
than 30 percentage points in pre-election polls. Last Monday, on the
eve of the election, Bloomberg nevertheless spent 17 hours in the
streets and subway stations of New York asking average New Yorkers
for their vote. The mayor spoke to several dozen residents of a
retirement home -- not to a huge senior citizen rally. He visited a
church in the Bronx to talk with parishioners -- not with bigwigs in
the church leadership.
The day before he had delivered speeches in all five
of the city's boroughs. He campaigned at this furious pace for
several months. Keep in mind that Bloomberg is a billionaire, the
founder and owner of the Bloomberg financial news agency, and that
he spent some $70 million on his re-election campaign, nearly 10
times more than his opponent.
Why would a politician who's leading by a huge
margin in the polls spend so much time and effort campaigning door
to door? Because for the loser election day is the end of the road,
while for the winner victory at the polls is just the beginning.
To run a major city effectively you need to have
more than a message; you have to know how the voters will react to
it. And there's only one way to find out.
What kind of problems does New York face? The
business districts in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn need to be
revitalized. The city needs a new baseball stadium. There is a
chronic shortage of affordable housing. Sound familiar?
Last Monday, I was invited to attend a campaign
event organized by Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin of the Yabloko
party, both running for the Moscow City Duma. The candidates were
meeting with the residents of an apartment building on Leninsky
Prospekt to ask for their votes on Dec. 4.
Navalny, who is running on the Yabloko party list
and therefore will almost certainly win a seat in the next City
Duma, tackled the nuts-and-bolts issues, such as the thorny problem
of rakushki, the temporary garages which have sprouted like
mushrooms in the city's courtyards in recent years. It came as no
surprise that the 30-something middle manager who had recently
bought an apartment in the building was in favor of the garages,
while a stern elderly woman who had lived there for 30 years was
opposed.
Yashin, who is running for a single-mandate seat,
stuck to the big-picture issues where consensus was easier to reach.
None of the residents who attended the meeting in their courtyard
knew that Muscovites no longer directly choose their mayor, for
example, and no one was particularly pleased by the news. This does
not, of course, mean that they will automatically vote for
opposition candidates on election day.
I'm particularly interested to find out how the 16
percent of voters in my district who backed "against all" in the
2003 election will vote now that this option has been removed.
I'm not asking Muscovites to vote for Navalny and
Yashin or any other specific candidate in the City Duma race. I
would simply encourage them to vote for the candidate who takes the
trouble to meet with them in their courtyard or stops to speak with
them in the metro, and explains why he or she deserves their vote.
If a New York billionaire is willing to get out there and press the
flesh, our politicians should be, too. It won't cost them a dime and
might win them a new follower or two. And I'll be right there ready
to shake their hands.
Konstantin Sonin is a professor at the New
Economic School/CEFIR and a columnist for Vedomosti.
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