What Does a Huge Win by de Blasio Portend?

If you haven't been following New York City's mayor race all you need to know is that a progressive Democrat, Bill de Blasio, an advocate for the Sandinistas in his youth, is poised to wallop the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, by a margin not seen since Ed Koch won his third term in 1985 by 68 percentage points. De Blasio will be the first Democrat elected mayor since David Dinkins in 1989 (when I lived in the Big Apple).

Here's a good snapshot of the race from this morning's story, "De Blasio in Position to Win Mayor’s Race by Historic Margin, Poll Shows," by David Chen and Megan Thee-Brenan:

Mr. de Blasio won the Democratic primary by running as the most liberal of the major candidates in the field; he has proposed raising taxes on high-income New Yorkers and has supported greater oversight of the Police Department. Nonetheless, one in five Republicans are supporting him for mayor, suggesting in follow-up interviews that they are looking for change after eight years with Rudolph W. Giuliani as mayor followed by 12 years with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. 

“I think de Blasio’s policies will be a change for the better from the Bloomberg era,” said Duane Dowden, a 33-year-old Brooklyn Republican who is a student in social work. Oswald Ramotar, a 51-year-old Queens Republican, agreed, saying, “I’m voting for de Blasio because I think he would bring better changes than Lhota would, like creating more jobs.” And Erick Washington, a 59-year-old Brooklyn Republican, said, “I’m not voting for Lhota because I feel that would be the same as voting for the Giuliani administration.”

Exhaustion with twenty years of Republican executive leadership is not the only issue motivating New Yorkers; the recent Tea Party contrived federal government shutdown is also a factor: "The recent federal government shutdown did not help Mr. Lhota: 47 percent of likely voters said that the shutdown made them more likely to vote for a Democrat, while only 6 percent said it prompted them to back a Republican."

To find answers as to how de Blasio's New York City strength plays nationally check out Thomas Edsall's opinion piece from last week, "Bill de Blasio and the New Urban Populism." As I've said frequently, Thomas Edsall's online column for the New York Times is one of the best sources available for divining the shifts underway in our national politics. I don't always agree with his conclusions and forecasts, but I think that his chosen areas of focus -- income inequality, the gradual diminishing of whites to minority status in the electorate, the war in the GOP between organizational elites and the Tea Party -- are on the money.

Speaking of money, the money passage in Edsall's column on the New York City mayoral election is as follows:

DEMOGRAPHICALLY, New York City is already where the nation will be sometime in the latter part of this century. Whites are 33.3 percent of the city’s population. Hispanics are close behind, at 28.6 percent, and blacks are at 22.8 percent. This demographic profile,as shown in Figure 2, is significantly different from what it was 1990, a year after the last mayoral victory by a liberal Democrat, David Dinkins. In 1990, whites were the clearly dominant plurality group at 43.2 percent, with roughly equal numbers of blacks, 25.2 percent, and Hispanics, 24.4 percent. 

More important in terms of both election outcomes and policy making, the city’s electorate – the people who actually go out and cast ballots – shifted from a 56 percent white majority in 1989 to a 46 percent minority in 2009, during the last mayoral election. If that transition continues at roughly the same rate, about 1 percentage point every two years, the 2013 electorate for the mayoral election will be 44 percent white. 

Among the reasons the electorate in New York has a higher percentage of whites and a smaller proportion of minorities than the city’s population as a whole is that a higher percentage of whites are of voting age and a higher percentage of minorities are not citizens and are thus ineligible to vote.

As whiteness evaporates nationally the country will become more progressive. Why? Because blacks and Hispanics are not as reflexively conservative and individualistic as whites:

By almost every measure, whites are more economically conservative than blacks and Hispanics. Surveys conducted over 36 years by American National Election Studies have found that blacks, by margins of 2 or 3 to 1, believe that government should “see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living,” while whites, by margins nearly as large, believe that “government should just let each person get ahead on their own.”

The A.N.E.S. surveys did not break out Hispanic responses to this question. A Pew Research Center report from April 2012, “Hispanics and Their Views of Identity,” did compare the views of Latinos to the general population. It asked the question “would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or bigger government providing more services?” A majority of all voters favored smaller government by a 48-41 margin, but Hispanics preferred a bigger government decisively, by 75 to 19 percent. 

There is a fundamental disagreement along racial and ethnic lines about what causes poverty. This is demonstrated in a June 2012 Pew survey that asked, “In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor, lack of effort on his or her own part, or circumstances beyond his or her control?” Whites were split, 41-41, but strong majorities of blacks and Hispanics answered “circumstances beyond his or her control,” 62-28 and 59-27, respectively. The premise of the de Blasio agenda is that people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control and therefore government intervention is essential. How you responded to the Pew question is likely to correlate strongly with whether you support or oppose de Blasio and how deeply felt your choice is.

The Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance -- the 2010 Citizens United decision, the upcoming decision on Buckley -- as well as its striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are attempts to keep the progressive hordes at bay. But the progressive hordes are coming. They already elected an Obama twice. And even though Obama governs as a Clinton New Democrat he campaigned and won his elections as a progressive.

Edsall sees trouble ahead for the Democrats. He thinks that while there is a fraction of wealthy progressives who will stick with a de Blasio progressive Democrat through thick and thin even when he raises their taxes substantially, soon down the road as the national Democratic Party tilts more and more to the left the wealthy will abandon the organization:

In addition to the growing leverage of minority and low-income voters in the Democratic Party, the center-left coalition includes many upscale, well-educated social liberals, who have found common ground with their less fortunate allies in shared animosity toward the Republican Party. 

The stronger the pro-government poor-to-lower-middle class wing gets, the more likely the coalition will fracture along class and economic fault lines. 

As many affluent progressive-leaning voters move to the suburbs (by 2010 New York lost 129,165 residents who had been between the ages 25 and 34 in 2000), have children, buy homes and pay significant property taxes, they are more likely to join the ranks of those who oppose a political party that seeks to increase their tax burdens. They will become legitimate targets for recruitment by a Republican Party that is reasonably conservative — if that stops being an oxymoron. 

Will de Blasio and the new urban populism alienate the party’s upscale wing? In New York and other major American cities, there are many affluent liberals who are willing to support policies redistributing their income to those struggling to make ends meet. But they don’t make up a majority of the affluent voters who are currently alienated by Republican extremism — and these voters are an essential component of the coalition Democratic strategists plan to use to map out their political future. The growing leftward tilt of the national Democratic Party reflected in political trends in New York is as likely to provoke intraparty conflict as it is to usher in an era of revived liberalism. There are risks and benefits to standing foursquare in support of the least advantaged.

I think, yes, Edsall is right. Intraparty conflict is coming down the pike, much as it is the norm now in the Republican Party. It will be on display as Hillary gears up for a run in 2016. The organizational elite will trot out corporate Democrats who are progressive on social issues like gay marriage -- look at Seattle's mayoral race -- but hew to the same old exhausted neoliberal nostrums. At best this is only a strategy that buys a bit of time. Change is coming. The current paradigm is broken; we need a shift.