Only 24% of New Yorkers approve of Mayor Bloomberg’s performance as mayor, the principal defender of the mayor’s policies, the New York Times, has found in its latest poll. That’s a drop from the 32% approval rating he got in a May Quinnipiac University poll, and from the 31% he got in a Times poll in January. It is, as the Times puts it, “the lowest approval rating for a mayor since The Times began asking about mayoral performance in 1978.”

The results come after a period in which Mr. Bloomberg won what he considered a political victory — imposing tax increases on already over-taxed New Yorkers over the opposition of Governor Pataki. This was billed as a “bailout” to save the city from a “doomsday budget,” even though the tax increases will damage the city more than the spending cuts they were aimed at preventing. Significant spend ing cuts would have been helpful in trimming back New York’s bloated public sector to a reasonable size. Mr. Pataki, who resisted the tax increases, won a higher approval rating in last night’s Times poll: 42%. The voters of New York City, it seems, reckon Mr. Pataki knows better than Mr. Bloomberg what is good for them.

Apart from the policy issues, what’s becoming increasingly apparent is the mayor’s lack of political skills. A case in point was last night when, in an interview on New York One, Mr. Bloomberg was asked what he thought of the speaker of the City Council, Democrat Gifford Miller. “If he were in my district I’d probably vote for him,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “I think he’s doing a good job as the speaker of the City Council.”

Left flabbergasted was the Republican who is running against Mr. Miller for City Council, a 33-year-old Wall Street lawyer, Jennifer Arangio. “I was quite surprised and quite shocked,” she told The New York Sun last night. “All Republican candidates are expecting the support of the mayor. He is a Republican mayor….Here we are in the middle of a petition campaign.…I don’t think he was thinking.” Ms. Arangio is running on the “Urban Republican” platform that calls for cuts in both taxes and spending. She says she’s running against Mr. Miller because of “a very serious difference in philosophies.”

“I believe that raising taxes is not the answer,” Ms. Arangio said. “There haven’t been enough spending cuts.”

The president of the New York Young Republican Club, Robert Alan Hornak, told the Sun that he thought it was “unfortunate” that Mr. Bloomberg was “making a judgment in the middle of a campaign season when we have a fan tastic Republican running in that district.” Mr. Hornak is managing Ms. Arangio’s campaign.

Mr. Bloomberg has managed to alienate his own party, the Republicans. Yet he’ll surely face Democratic opposition when he is up for re-election in 2005. The Times poll shows his support is weakest among a traditionally Democratic constituency, blacks. It’s too early to write the mayor off totally — he’ll get credit if the public schools improve, and an economic recovery could make tax cuts a possibility just in time for the next election. But as he ponders the polls, Mr. Bloomberg could do worse than to invite Ms. Arangio to lunch and ask her for her thoughts on why his poll numbers are worse than the governor’s.