New York’s Democrats Head to the Polls
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

After months of accepting campaign literature at subway stops and weeks of hearing sound bites on the evening news, New York City’s registered Democrats will pick a nominee to challenge Mayor Bloomberg today and vote in primaries for dozens of other offices throughout the city.
Turnout is not expected to be as high as it was for the 2001 mayoral primary, when – in an election begun on September 11 and postponed because of the terrorist attacks – roughly 785,000 Democrats voted. Nevertheless, each of the four candidates will have volunteers and field staff shuttling voters to the polls in neighborhoods from East Tremont in the Bronx to Stapleton on Staten Island in an effort to mobilize supporters.
As the candidates took a last lap around the city yesterday, shaking hands with voters in neighborhoods they deemed strategic on the electoral map, final public opinion polls suggested that today’s primary would lead to a runoff election between the former president of the Bronx, Fernando Ferrer, who has long been considered the front-runner, and Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has made an eleventh-hour surge among likely voters.
A WNBC/Marist poll conducted this weekend and released yesterday found that 35% of likely voters planned to support Mr. Ferrer, 29% planned to vote for Mr. Weiner, and 14% each said they would support the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, and the president of Manhattan, C. Virginia Fields. The rest remained undecided.
In the citywide races, winning the primary outright requires 40% of the vote. Yesterday, political analysts, who for months have been discussing whether Mr. Ferrer will hit that mark, said that voter turnout would be crucial and that with many voters undecided, there were still a few plausible outcomes.
“Right now the numbers suggest a runoff, but you really can’t tell,” the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, Lee Miringoff, said.
The Democratic Party has 2.6 million registered voters in the five boroughs – more than five times the enrollment of the Republican Party – but the mayoral campaign has sparked little excitement among rank-and-file voters and has been labeled lackluster by some prominent members of the party, who have openly praised Mr. Bloomberg for doing a respectable job.
In April, a former Nebraska senator, Robert Kerrey, who now serves as president of the New School University at Manhattan, flirted with the idea of entering the race, a move that would have ramped up interest in the Democratic nomination. But he backed out a few days later.
The campaign has been defined more by the Democrats’ flubs than by their policy proposals. The first came on March 15, when Mr. Ferrer told members of the Sergeants Benevolent Association that the 1999 killing by police of an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, was not a crime. Though Mr. Ferrer had gone to jail to protest the shooting after it happened, the comment was viewed as an about-face and has haunted him since.
Mr. Miller and Ms. Fields, too, suffered self-inflicted wounds. The Fields campaign came under fire for doctoring a photo on a campaign mailing. Mr. Miller was assailed for spending $1.6 million from his government office on a campaign-style mass mailing and, more recently, for spending unprecedented sums for the ostensible purpose of circulating nominating petitions.
“For good or ill, whether it is the fault of the candidate, the fault of the media, or both, I think the campaign has been marked more by gaffes than by anything else,” a political science professor at Baruch College, Douglas Muzzio, said.
Mr. Muzzio compared this year’s campaign to the 1997 mayoral primary between the Reverend Al Sharpton and the president of Manhattan, Ruth Messinger, which he called a “snooze.”
“Everybody knew the Rudy was going to win, so nobody got into the primary,” Mr. Muzzio said, referring to Mayor Giuliani. “In order to throw out an incumbent he has to be a disaster or corrupt, and Bloomberg’s been neither.”
The enthusiasm the Democrats have aroused has come mostly in the past two weeks, as television commercials have flooded the airwaves and the candidates have been campaigning at breakneck speed. Yesterday, for example, Ms. Fields and Mr. Ferrer ran into each other at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal as both were greeting evening rush-hour commuters.
The city’s comptroller, William Thompson Jr. – who dropped his own Democratic mayoral bid in December, is running unopposed for re-election, and is seen as a leading mayoral candidate for 2009 unless the Democratic nominee defeats Mr. Bloomberg this fall – said the party learned an important lesson from the 2001 primary, which was marked by racial divisiveness that was viewed as helping Mr. Bloomberg win City Hall.
Though some have seen the candidates’ hesitation to criticize each other as a liability, Mr. Thompson said attacking each other would “leave a bad taste” and would ultimately hurt the party. The comptroller endorsed Mr. Ferrer this summer and said yesterday he would be on the campaign trail with him today, rallying voters.
But even as the candidates have doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars for nationally active campaign consultants and racked up endorsements, many of the historically left-leaning unions in the city have opted to sit this election out, because none of the candidates have been inspiring and Mr. Bloomberg is expected to win another four years.
The president of the Working Families Party, Dan Cantor, said yesterday the candidates did not spend enough time addressing poverty and other issues important to voters.
Political analysts said in additional to the mayoral primary, they would be paying attention to the race to replace Ms. Fields as president of Manhattan, where nine candidates were vying in a race without a runoff.
They also said they’d be watching the race for Manhattan district attorney, where the incumbent of three decades, Robert Morgenthau, is facing his toughest re-election race, against a former judge and prosecutor, Leslie Crocker Snyder; the race for public advocate, where the incumbent, Betsy Gotbaum, has three challengers; the primary for Brooklyn district attorney, in which Charles Hynes has three challengers, and several key City Council races, which would bring in fresh faces and play a role in determining the body’s next speaker.
Meanwhile, as the Democrats wait for election returns tonight at four different Manhattan locations, Mr. Bloomberg is planning a party of his own, at the Brooklyn Marriott. There, the press was told yesterday, Bloomberg supporters will be available for interviews in English, Spanish, Bengali, Chinese, Greek, Haitian, Creole, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, and a number of other languages. Mayor Koch and his 2001 primary opponent, Herman Badillo, are scheduled to attend. The party will allow the mayor, who is expected to spend up to $100 million of his personal fortune on the general election, to show his strength early.
Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign avoided a Republican primary when it won the disqualification of the petitions of a challenger, Thomas Ognibene, a Queens lawyer who is running for mayor on the Conservative line in November. When the mayor was asked yesterday why he was holding a party on the night of the Democratic primary, he said: “Why not? Nobody owns the night.”
He added, “It’s a chance for me to say thank you” to the campaign’s volunteers.
“In terms of running, I wish them all good luck,” Mr. Bloomberg said of the four Democrats who are seeking his job. “It can get lonely out there. My sympathies are with them, and I’m looking forward to the general election.”
The polls are open between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.