While Mayor Bloomberg is hatching his scheme for nonpartisan elections, another wealthy New York businessman is starting to look at the mayoralty — and the result could be one of the most unlikely ideological inversions in years. Supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis is the opposite of Mr. Bloomberg. A jolly, gregarious figure, he built his fortune on supermarkets and convenience stores. He made his millions serving not only top-of-the-line stock brokers who are the customers of Bloomberg News but also ordinary individuals out shopping for groceries, cigarettes, and gasoline, and he has lit up as the next election cycle approaches with a decidedly different perspective from the mayor.

This is going to become apparent in the months ahead via a new civic organization Mr. Catsimatidis is chairing called New York First. His notion is that before the political leaders go out solving all the problems of the world they ought to place a priority on New York, which bore the brunt of the at tacks on America in September two years ago. He is agitated that only several billion dollars of $21 billion promised in federal aid has actually been allocated for New York. He suggests Mr. Bloomberg’s move to the Republican Party — or Mr. Bloomberg’s innate aversion to politics — has left him unwilling or unable to rattle the cage in Washington. “Why is Bloomberg not being the squeaky wheel?” he asks.

More substantively, Mr. Catsimatidis is critical of the broad policy moves by the mayor, particularly the huge run-up in property taxes and the huge increase in the excise tax on cigarettes. He is also critical of the indoor smoking ban. He speaks with sympathy of the bodega owners, who are often minority businessmen. Their livelihoods have been devastated by the mayor’s lunge for a piece of the cigarette business through the city’s big increases of the cigarette tax. No doubt Mr. Catsimatidis’s empathy stems from his own experience as an immigrant businessman building an empire from a single store. He argues it’s senseless that the mayor’s tax policies have driven tobacco revenues to other states or to smugglers. He’s been rallying for the bodega owner recently arrested for shooting, in self defense, a thug seeking to rob his store.

If Mr. Catsimatidis pursues this line of thinking into the race for mayor, the result could be a Democrat who was once finance chairman for Senator Clinton running against a sitting Republican mayor from the right — at least on some key issues. He certainly doesn’t feel that raising taxes in the midst of a local recession is the way to jumpstart an economy. Or, to put it another way, we could find a mayor who is a Democrat-turned-Republican opposed by a Republican-turned-Democrat. It may be, of course, that New York First will turn out to be something other than the first steps in a political race. But it also may be that in advance of non-partisan elections the market is producing politicians who don’t relate to their parties.