In the parallel universe that is the left coast, Fernando Ferrer has just been elected mayor of Los Angeles in a landslide. Of course, you would have to be completely sun-addled to swallow the comparison whole. This is New York, and Mr. Ferrer is not the charismatic leader of a liberal Latino electoral ascension, as L.A.’s mayor-elect, Antonio Villaraigosa, has positioned himself. Nonetheless, there are political parallels between the nation’s two largest cities that should have Mayor Bloomberg paying attention.

L.A.’s recently rejected incumbent mayor, James Hahn, was an uninspiring but generally competent technocrat who presided over a city moving more or less in the right direction: Crime was down and property values were rising. His administration had been beset by minor controversies, but the mayor had successfully taken on some high-stakes political fights such as stopping a secession movement in the San Fernando Valley, and he promised to make accelerated education reform the first priority of his second term.

In the closing days of the campaign, Mr. Hahn half-jokingly told reporters from the L.A. Times that while he suffered from a “charisma deficit disorder,” he had “done the job people elected me to do.”

Competence was not enough to make Mr. Hahn’s campaign a cause that the middle class wanted to rally around. This week, he became the first mayor of L.A. to be prematurely retired from office since the Great Depression.

With urban America back from the brink of the disaster of 15 years ago – when epidemic violent street crime, escalating welfare rolls, and a deteriorating tax base were facts of life – citizens have begun to take the turnaround for granted.

In the absence of an outwardly heroic mayor in the post-September 11 era, voters are tempted to fall back on the more traditional political calculus of party loyalty and ethnic identity. This is the logic that Tammany Hall depended upon for so long. In a city with a 5-to-1 Democratic registration advantage, there is still a sense of frustrated entitlement despite the fact that Democrats have averaged less than 50% of the popular vote during the last 16 years of New York mayoral elections.

A complementary analysis of urban politics argues that every ethnic group gets its shot at City Hall before moving to the suburbs. The concept of Irish, Italian, and Jewish mayors – once controversial – is now unremarkable. With the number of Hispanics increasing in New York and across the nation, a Hispanic mayor should be a back-of-the-napkin-math safe bet to serve in City Hall.

Mr. Villaraigosa successfully rode this wave in his second attempt to be mayor of L.A. He had been leading Mr. Hahn in the polls for months, and won by a larger-than-expected 17-point margin. According to the L.A. Times’s exit poll, his support was broad-based, winning every ethnicity and splitting the “white” vote with Mr. Hahn, while the incumbent carried only Republicans.

Most troubling for Mr. Hahn was the lack of loyalty even his own supporters showed: Only 42% of Hahn voters said they liked him and his policies. This wasn’t an active dislike as much as apathy – a failure to own the office of mayor. Even 20% of Villaraigosa voters said they approved of the job Mr. Hahn had done; it was just apparently time for a change. In a low turnout election, 43% of all L.A. voters said they had cast their ballot for the lesser of two evils.

Like Los Angeles, New York City is likely to have a relatively low-turnout mayoral race in 2005, and we are also likely to see historic levels of Hispanic voter participation as L.A. did. Even without Mr. Ferrer on the ballot, Hispanic turnout has been trending upward in recent years, with surging voter totals in the Bronx and a decreased turnout in Republican must-win-decisively districts such as Staten Island. Like Mr. Hahn, Mr. Bloomberg has been having trouble exceeding 50% job-approval ratings in most polls, and while New Yorkers increasingly believe that our city is moving in the right direction, so far they do not give the mayor credit for the trend.

But Mr. Bloomberg has a few aces up his sleeve that weren’t available to Mr. Hahn: an imploding opponent, a more multifaceted Hispanic population, and an unlimited, self-funded war chest.

Like Mr. Villaraigosa, Mr. Ferrer had long been leading the mayor in the polls, but he has stumbled significantly since an oft-repeated moment of candor or pandering to police officers about the shooting of Amadou Diallo. Under fire from his Democratic competitors, Mr. Ferrer’s ratings among African Americans fell decisively in a hypothetical head-to-head race against Mr. Bloomberg. But while Mr. Ferrer’s free fall has Bloomberg staffers celebrating, the mayor’s underlying numbers do not justify overconfidence. His support among “white” voters seems stuck at under 60%; Staten Island currently registers at only 65% support for the mayor, and some Queens Republicans are in outright revolt.

The mayor has responded with an early first volley of ads, the first of which featured the mayor speaking in Spanish. While L.A.’s Hispanic population is overwhelmingly Mexican in origin, New York is more diverse, with Dominican immigrants and Puerto Ricans dominating the population. This translates to more political diversity in the community as well. Mayor Giuliani received the votes of nearly 50% of Hispanic males in his 1997 mayoral re-election. Hispanic community leaders such as Herman Badillo and a former Giuliani deputy mayor, Ninfa Segarra, have signed on to help the Bloomberg re-election effort as well.

The expected advertising onslaught by Mr. Bloomberg is an attempt to accelerate the belatedly shifting perceptions about the mayor’s record of achievement in office. Recent trends have been in his favor, and the other Democratic candidates have so far not succeeded in breaking away from the pack. But Mr. Bloomberg should keep the voice of James Hahn conceding defeat fresh in his head, “I should have spent more time bragging about what I was doing … The city is so much better off, that stuff didn’t just magically happen.”