The defeat of Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign to block political parties from being able to use primary elections to choose their nominees is an encouraging sign for the city — and may yet prove to be a help to the mayor as he prepares for his bid for a second term. The reason the mayor lost, by our lights, is that what he wanted to do with this proposal was eviscerate the Democratic Party in the City. But it was hard for him to go into that fight with much sympathy, let alone credibility. For he ran for office on a platform opposed to tax increases, yet turned around and adopted as his administration’s policies the main line of the Democratic Party ideology, which is to meet every crisis by boosting spending and raising taxes. If the mayor was going to make raising taxes, imposing more regulations on restaurants and other businesses, and boosting spending the thrust of his administration, what was the point of charter reform? In the end, he so alienated the conservative wing of the reform movement that, though he went into the fight with a lot of money, he had few allies.

This newspaper takes no delight in that outcome, even if we felt strongly about the constitutional questions. People should have the right to form political parties and to use primaries to choose the nominees of those parties. What we’d like to see come out of the mayor’s defeat on non-partisan elections is for the mayor to focus less on complaining about the process, less on trying to game the system (or even purchase the system), and more on formulating free market, pro-growth strategies to pull this city out of its slump. He campaigned for the mayoralty by arguing that tax increases were inappropriate. But he pushed through more historic tax increases, with the result that the city has been left out of the Bush Boom, as people are calling the 7.2% growth rate at which the economy has been recently clocked. What the mayor needs to do now is dedicate the second half of his term to campaigning for a rollback of the tax increases, a deregulation of business, and reforms designed to allow parents to choose where to educate their children.

No doubt there are going to be efforts now to portray the mayor’s defeat as a situation in which the Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, Governor Pataki and the good government types, many of whom we admire greatly, were rolled by the labor unions, the Democratic party hacks, and Senators Schumer and Clinton. But it’s worth remembering that that other ballot initiatives, such as the one on term limits several years ago, passed, despite being opposed by the same sort of cabal. This round would more accurately be portrayed as a case in which the voters proved, yet again, that they are capable of making nuanced decisions.

That was underscored by the decision of the voters to reject the ballot proposals that would have empowered the regulatory apparatus in New York to go marauding through the business community and would have given smaller cities the same debt ceilings for schools as bigger districts in the state, after years in which the borrowing power of government in the state of New York and its localities has been used recklessly. Voters also refused to empower the mayor to govern the conduct of administrative law judges. It kind of makes one regret that a referendum wasn’t held on the mayor’s scheme for fobbing the city’s debts off onto state taxpayers. In any event, there is much to think about in the results for those of who believe (as we do) that an electorate, like a market, is smarter than any individual and makes its decisions for reasons.

Not that the Democratic Party, which holds sway over so much of the City Council, take much encouragement from the result in this election. The Working Families Party, which elected a candidate, Letitia James, to succeed the murdered councilman James Davis, showed that the Democratic establishment is vulnerable to a determed new party. And the victory by the Republican candidate for district attorney in Richmond, Daniel Donovan, was another piece of evidence that the Democratic establishment can be beaten. At press time we were still awaiting results of the elections for Brooklyn judgeships, in which the Working Families Party’s slate, led by Margarita Lopez Torres, was challenging the hegemony of the Democratic machine. If Judge Lopez Torres wins, it will, given the scandals surrounding the Thurgood Marshall Democratic Club, a famous victory indeed.