Last night, Queens County Republicans met to formally endorse Thomas Ognibene’s renegade candidacy against Mayor Bloomberg. This marks the first official outright rebellion against the administration by the rank and file of its own party. Now speculation is spreading that the Bronx County Republicans are also considering an endorsement of Mr. Ognibene, a former City Council member.

“This is a reflection of the frustration and anger rampant in the rank and file of the Republican Party,” the City Council minority leader, James Oddo, fumed in an interview with me. “It is a natural conclusion to purging the Giuliani people and bringing in all Koch retreads … my relationship as a Republican City Council member with City Hall couldn’t get any worse with a Ferrer or Miller regime.”

When the city’s second-leading elected Republican is this furious at the administration, there are serious problems looming in the upcoming primary season of signature gathering to get on the ballot. Even the millions of dollars that Mr. Bloomberg plans to spend may have a hard time solving them.

Next Tuesday night, the Bloomberg re-election campaign will officially kick off at a party at B.B. King’s on 42nd Street, where an election-night surprise victory four years ago swept the self-made billionaire into City Hall. Mr. Bloomberg has since pursued a studiously bipartisan style of governing. It is a matter of principle for the former Democrat, but in his pursuit of principle it now appears he has gone too far and ignored political reality.

Democrats begin citywide elections with a 5 to 1 registration advantage. Republican administrations cannot afford to have their base divided by an outright rebellion. The loss of one and possibly two out of five local county organizations is a devastating indictment of the Bloomberg administration’s failure to reach out to outer-borough Republicans.

Some Queens Republicans friendly toward the mayor abstained from last night’s vote in the belief that they would be overwhelmed by the more conservative Ognibene supporters. Even those mobilizing to reject the administration acknowledge that Mr. Ognibene is unlikely to win the primary or the general election, but as one Queens leader said, “Tom won’t win, but at least he will pull the mayor to the center. … So we’ll be out in the cold, but we’ve been out in the cold for the past four years.”

This notion that a conservative challenge to the incumbent mayor is what is necessary to drag Mr. Bloomberg back to the political center should raise the troubling possibility in City Hall that their bipartisan style of governance has not been bipartisan at all, but has in fact shown a consistent bias toward the Democratic establishment in New York City.

There is much evidence for this. “We don’t have a single commissioner or deputy commissioner,” complained a Queens Republican leader. In fact, the administration’s first 59 judicial nominees were all Democrats. “If it’s patronage, it’s patronage for Democrats,” protests Councilman Oddo.

What is worst for Team Bloomberg is that this was a predictable problem not adequately anticipated by administrative actions. The sense that local Republican groups have not been reached out to or treated with respect has been festering for some time.

Indeed, last year when Mr. Ognibene first started flirting with a right-wing challenge to Mr. Bloomberg, Queens County Republicans made a decision to hold off any vote so as not to embarrass the mayor on the eve of the Republican convention coming to New York and to give the administration a chance to reach out more consistently to their ranks. This has not occurred. As these rebellions moved from the theoretical to outright action against the incumbent administration, it is time to ask: Who lost Queens? And is the Bronx next?

There must be some accountability for the failure to galvanize local political club rank and file for the administration. Councilman Oddo blames “the immediate circle around the mayor – they’ve never seen a Republican relationship that they couldn’t inflame … the wordsmiths, the message people, a lot of the blame falls at their feet. They’ve neglected the base. … They’ve walked away from the promise that they were going to walk in the footsteps of Rudy Giuliani.”

Some local Republicans argue that the situation is still salvageable. “There are a lot of Republicans who may not love Bloomberg, but they’ll support him because it’s the practical thing to do and because they think that Ferrer could be the second coming of David Dinkins,” says New York Young Republican leader Robert Hornak. “What the mayor’s office needs to do is find a way to reach out to these Republicans who just need a little extra incentive.”

But such administration outreach may be too little, too late. Now there is blood in the water, and the location of the wound is particularly harmful: Queens will be the tipping point borough in this year’s election, a must win for a Republican candidate. Mr. Oddo understands this and even believes that a stronger-than-expected showing by Rep. Anthony Weiner could prove trouble for the may or by cutting into his base, warning, “If Weiner ever got out of the Democratic primary, he would play well in the outer-borough, ethnic, working-class, conservative community.” Most of all, however, the Bloomberg administration’s biggest problem with their Republican base seems to come from themselves. “They act like everyone is a political whore who can be bought,” bitterly recounts the Republican minority leader. “Well, I’m not going to be bought.”

There is a great tradition of Republican mayors serving at the head of what were essentially fusion campaigns organized in opposition to the Tammany-dominated Democratic machine. Even in the age of Fiorello La Guardia – who found it no difficulty to straddle allegiance to both the Republican and Socialist parties – Republican citizen groups were made to feel appreciated and engaged. The time when this most famously failed to occur, during the administration of John Lindsay, City Hall found itself losing the Republican nomination outright. While Mr. Lindsay did not have tens of millions of dollars to spend to win the Republican primary, the challenge to the Bloomberg administration is no less serious.