With Mayor Bloomberg poised to coast to a re-election victory tomorrow by what may be a historic margin, it’s not too early to begin to draw some lessons. The Ferrer campaign and its apologists are accusing Mr. Bloomberg of having bought the election, as if New Yorkers were so easily manipulable. By this logic, New York City would have been carried by Governor Golisano and President Perot. Other Democrats blame Mr. Ferrer for running a gaffe-filled campaign. Our own tradition in election week is to pay homage to the wisdom of the voters, which in this case means celebrating a city that, for all the stereotypes about it being a hotbed of Greenwich Village and Upper West Side-style leftism, is increasingly open to common sense when it is spoken, notwithstanding the party affiliation of the speaker.

How did Mr. Bloomberg triumph as a Republican in a city where Democrats are a 5-to-1 majority? It didn’t happen overnight. The point at which a majority of New York voters began to realize that the excesses of leftism were hurting the city can be traced back at least as far as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s victory over Bella Abzug in the 1976 Democratic primary and Edward Koch’s victory over Abzug in 1977. Mayor Giuliani’s successes in crime control, tax reduction, welfare reform, and order maintenance consolidated those gains. At the national level, President Reagan’s triumph in carrying New York State in 1984 and President Bush’s sharply improved showing in 2004 over 2000 – Mr. Bush won 543,000 votes in New York City last year with hardly anything in the way of an advertising budget or field operation – contributed to the shift. The attack of September 11, 2001, underscored the importance of a foreign policy that takes the fight to the enemy and expands freedom abroad.

Now Mr. Bloomberg is the latest to reap the benefits of New Yorkers’ openmindedness. Some attribute the mayor’s strong showing to his supposed centrism, his willingness to part ways with conservative Republicanism by opposing gun rights and supporting abortion rights. Yet we haven’t observed that this campaign has come down to a fight over guns and abortion. No, what our reporting suggests is driving the election and the support for Bloomberg is a sense by New Yorkers that their persons and property are safer under Mr. Bloomberg’s leadership than under the leftist policies of Mr. Ferrer and that Mr. Bloomberg’s big gamble on the schools is paying off.

The aggressive counter-terrorism and crime-fighting measures undertaken by Mr. Bloomberg’s police department headed by Raymond Kelly inspire confidence, even though they’ve also inspired a law suit by the New York Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Bloomberg, who erred in raising taxes in his first term, is clearly the low-tax candidate in this race against Mr. Ferrer, who wants to raise taxes even more and prevent some of Mr. Bloomberg’s tax increases from sun-setting on schedule. Mr. Ferrer has tried to criticize Mr. Bloomberg for being too generous with Goldman Sachs and with developers of luxury condominiums, but the attacks are not resonating because most New Yorkers see the boom in luxury housing as a sign of the city’s vitality and know that Wall Street is a key contributor to the city’s economic growth.

The Giuliani and Bloomberg years have seen a vast expansion in homeownership in the city and a corresponding rise in the value of residential real estate in New York. With so many New Yorkers personally invested in the city’s success, with so much of their personal net worth tied up in their homes, the popular appeal diminishes for leftist policies such as lax policing that encourages vagrancy and graffiti or high taxes that cause businesses and jobs to flee the city.

The struggle to save our schools figures into this for a number of reasons, and only part of it is about education. It’s also about enabling middle-class New Yorkers, many of whom fled the city in search of a working school system, to build their lives here, which is enormously difficult to do while paying high taxes in the city and also paying for private education. One way to think of school reform is that it’s a kind of tax relief in and of itself. Chancellor Klein’s decision to join the charter school movement, indeed to help lead it, marked, along with the arrival of encouraging test scores, one of the important turning points for Mr. Bloomberg.

We don’t mind saying that we’ll take no joy in seeing Fernando Ferrer get such a beating as the polls indicate he’s going to get (and we’re well aware that surprises are always possible; the mayor’s supporters need very much to go to the polls, even though victory seems assured). But if this marks a turning point for the Democrats, it will be a good thing. Meantime the mayor’s impending victory is the latest in a series of political developments suggesting that when one gets down to particulars, New Yorkers aren’t as far left as the stereotype – and that they are part of a national rightward trend in America that has been the big political story of the past generation.

Endorsements

The New York Sun has endorsed the following in tomorrow’s election. Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

MAYOR
Michael Bloomberg (Republican-Liberal).
Progress on policing and schools, the low-tax alternative to his Democratic opponent

PUBLIC ADVOCATE
Jay Golub (Conservative)
A supporter of tax cuts and school vouchers

BALLOT PROPOSAL ONE
Vote NO to the legislature’s attempted power grab over the state budget

BALLOT PROPOSAL TWO
Vote NO to this attempt to add $2.9 billion to the state’s already staggering debt

BALLOT QUESTION FOUR
Vote NO to this charter revision that would mean tax increases to balance the budget

CITY COUNCIL
Joshua Yablon (Republican) Upper West Side, Sixth District
Yvette Velazquez Bennett (Republican, Conservative) Brooklyn, 39th District
Joel Zinberg (Republican) Upper East Side, Fifth District
Jody Hall (Republican) Staten Island, 49th District