Bill de Blasio is the 109th mayor of New York City, a distinguished position as one of the most visible leaders in all the land. But we already knew that months ago.
Since at least August, when de Blasio took the lead in the polls, there has been a near unanimous feeling within the city that de Blasio would be the next mayor. Affable, approachable, and hailing from a working class background in Brooklyn helped craft an image of a more progressive mayor.
Early exit polls tonight showed de Blasio with a roughly 70% lead, with many news outlets calling it a win for him several hours before the polls closed and votes were counted. To be fair, he faced little opposition: his opponent Joe Lhota seemed crotchety and distant in comparison to the downright sociable Mister de Blasio, and Lhota also bore an unfortunate resemblance to everyone you’d ever want to punch in the face. This facepunchingness, combined with Lhota’s further resemblance to a grumpy and out-of-touch high school principal from a John Hughes movie, essentially lost him the election.
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The New York Times, seemingly unable to contain their throbbing erections, stopped just short of hailing him as the second coming of Jesus, saying:
The lopsided outcome represented the triumph of a populist message over a formidable résumé in a campaign that became a referendum on an entire era, starting with Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and ending with the incumbent mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg.
Throughout the race, Mr. de Blasio overshadowed his opponent by channeling New Yorkers’ rising frustrations with income inequality, aggressive policing tactics and lack of affordable housing, and by declaring that the ever-improving city need not leave so many behind.
To an unusual degree, he relied on his own biracial family to connect with an increasingly diverse electorate, electrifying voters with a television commercial featuring his charismatic teenage son, Dante, who has a towering Afro.
It is indeed a big day for the more liberal New Yorker, which is to say, everyone. After 20 years of big-business-minded mayors, de Blasio will be a welcome change, and may stop the overpricing of New York. As many people know, rents have skyrocketed in the last two decades, outpricing residents into the outer boroughs and beyond. Not that I’d particularly like for yet another Midwestern fine arts major to move to Williamsburg, but as the median rent for a studio apartment tops out at over $2,100 a month, perhaps it’s fair to say that the “big business” style of mayoralship has won.
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de Blasio (do you know how daring it is to start an AP style article without a capital letter? Do you? It’s a f*cking rush, man.) has not said whether he’ll remain in his Park Slope brownstone or move into the traditional mayor’s house at Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side. He seems like the kind of guy that might stick in the same place for a while because he knows the guys on his block, a real stand-up guy.
But we’ve known that for months.
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