Anglonautes > History > 2013 > USA

History > 2013 > USA > Politics (I)

Measures to Legalize Marijuana

Are Passed

November 6, 2013
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

DENVER — Marijuana proponents scored significant victories on Tuesday as voters around the country passed ballot measures decriminalizing marijuana possession and approved regulatory taxes on the drug.

In Colorado, voters backed a heavy tax on recreational marijuana, which was made legal here last year. The tax will pay for the cost of overseeing the state’s marijuana industry as well as school construction.

Voters in three Michigan cities approved measures legalizing the possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by adults on private property, following Detroit and Flint, which passed similar measures last year. And voters in Portland, Me., passed an ordinance legalizing the possession of up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana by adults over 21, making it the first East Coast city to pass such a law, advocates said.

The victories are widely seen as fuel for the legalization movement, which has chipped away at state drug laws over the past decade and has vowed to push for more changes from state legislatures.

“A majority of Americans now agree that marijuana should be legal for adults, and this was reflected at the polls,” said Mason Tvert, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, one of the main groups behind the legislative initiatives across the country.

“There is clearly momentum behind marijuana policy reform,” Mr. Tvert said. “We expect to see these kinds of measures passing across the nation over the next several years.”

Marijuana supporters saw little opposition during this election cycle — evidence, they said, that public sentiment is shifting in favor of less stringent drug laws.

In Ferndale, Mich., nearly 70 percent of voters approved an ordinance legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana. And in the city of Jackson, 60 percent of residents supported a similar measure.

In Lansing, where the mayor backed legalization, unofficial election results showed the measure there winning handily, with 8,550 voters supporting it and 5,339 opposing.

Chuck Ream, co-founder of the Safer Michigan Coalition, which has pushed for legalization for years, said he was struck by how easily the local ordinances passed. “They were all landslides,” Mr. Ream said.

He said advocates had gained momentum to push for a proposal pending in Michigan’s statehouse that would make it a misdemeanor to possess small amounts of marijuana. “We certainly hope that the Legislature will act immediately to pass the decriminalization law for the entire state of Michigan, now that they see that voters absolutely don’t support prohibition any longer,” he said.

Similarly, in Portland, Maine’s largest city, marijuana advocates said their victory — by nearly 30 percentage points — would help persuade lawmakers to pass legislation to regulate marijuana and alcohol in a similar manner.

“We have always viewed this as a first step to bring the sale and distribution of marijuana to Maine,” said David Marshall, a Portland city councilor and one of the leading supporters of the new ordinance.

Young progressive voters turned out in large numbers, Mr. Marshall said, helping to widen the margin of victory.

“We were confident going in. We’re going to start seeing what steps we want to take to bring this to the next level,” he said.

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and there is still uncertainty around how local law enforcement officials will handle decriminalization measures passed by municipalities.

In Portland, for example, the city’s police chief, Michael Sauschuck, said he would continue to enforce Maine state law, under which marijuana possession of less than 2.5 ounces is a civil offense.

“The ordinance in question really won’t affect our day-to-day operations,” he said. “Quite frankly, it’s really a status quo situation.”

Colorado and Washington are the only states to have legalized marijuana statewide, and Colorado’s efforts to create a regulatory framework have served as a prototype for marijuana advocates around the country.

On Tuesday, a majority of Colorado voters approved a 15 percent excise tax on the wholesale price of recreational marijuana, and an additional 10 percent sales tax on its retail price.

Lawmakers from both parties, as well as Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, and the state’s attorney general, a Republican, backed the tax measure, which passed with 65 percent of the vote.

“We are grateful voters approved funding that will allow for a strong regulatory environment, just like liquor is regulated,” Mr. Hickenlooper said in a statement. “We will do everything in our power to make sure kids don’t smoke pot and that we don’t have people driving who are high. This ballot measure gives Colorado the ability to regulate marijuana properly.”

    Measures to Legalize Marijuana Are Passed, NYT, 6.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/
    measures-to-legalize-marijuana-are-passed.html

Terry McAuliffe, Democrat,

Is Elected Governor of Virginia

in Tight Race

November 5, 2013
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

TYSONS CORNER, Va. — Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Democratic fund-raiser and ally of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, was elected governor of Virginia on Tuesday, narrowly defeating the state’s conservative attorney general, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, and confirming Virginia’s evolution as a state increasingly dominated politically by the Democratic-leaning Washington suburbs.

Mr. McAuliffe, 56, ran as a social liberal and an economic moderate focused on job creation. Mr. Cuccinelli, a Republican who was the first attorney general to sue over President Obama’s health care law, ran as a hard-line social conservative and aimed his campaign almost exclusively at the Tea Party wing of his party.

Still, despite substantially outraising Mr. Cuccinelli, $34.4 million to $19.7 million, Mr. McAuliffe won by a margin — just over two percentage points — that was smaller than some pre-election polls had suggested.

Mr. McAuliffe benefited from an electorate that was less white and less Republican than it was four years ago. He drew about as large a percentage of African-Americans as Mr. Obama did last year. Blacks accounted for one in five voters, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research. Mr. Cuccinelli’s strong anti-abortion views also brought out opponents, with 20 percent of voters naming abortion as their top issue; Mr. McAuliffe overwhelmingly won their support. The top issue for voters was the economy, cited by 45 percent in exit polls.

In a victory speech here, Mr. McAuliffe thanked the “historic number of Republicans who crossed party lines to support me” and invoked a tradition of bipartisanship in Richmond, the capital. In a checklist of recent governors who had moved the economy forward, he included the incumbent, Bob McDonnell, a Republican.

“Over the next four years, most Democrats and Republicans in Virginia want to make Virginia a model for pragmatic leadership that is friendly to job creation,” Mr. McAuliffe said.

His tone was notably more conciliatory than that of Mr. Cuccinelli, who struck a defiant note at a rally in Richmond, interpreting the closeness of the race to a rejection of Mr. Obama’s health care law. “Despite being outspent by an unprecedented $15 million, this race came down to the wire because of Obamacare,” Mr. Cuccinelli said, adding, “We were lied to by our own government.”

That Mr. McAuliffe was elected in a onetime Republican stronghold while unapologetically supporting gun restrictions, same-sex marriage and abortion rights will no doubt be scrutinized by both parties, particularly by Republicans concerned about the appeal of the Tea Party in swing states and districts ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. And Mr. Cuccinelli’s defeat in a Southern state will no doubt be contrasted with the Republicans’ great success of the day, the dominating re-election of Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who appeals to swaths of Democrats. But the close result, after a race in which Mr. Cuccinelli was substantially outspent, could make it difficult to draw firm conclusions.

Mr. Cuccinelli, 45, whose passionate base seemed to give him an early edge in a race between two flawed candidates, rattled business-oriented Republicans. A surprising roster of the party’s establishment — including Will Sessoms, the mayor of the largest city, Virginia Beach — endorsed Mr. McAuliffe.

Mr. McAuliffe’s career as a wealthy business investor yielded many unflattering and, critics said, possibly unethical details. But he neutralized the issue by arguing that Mr. Cuccinelli’s social agenda, which included hostile comments about homosexuality, staunch opposition to abortion and an attempt to discredit a climate scientist at the University of Virginia, would give the state a retrograde image that would deter businesses from moving here.

A key issue was Mr. McAuliffe’s embrace of a roads bill championed and signed by Mr. McDonnell, which Mr. Cuccinelli opposed because it raised taxes. In rapidly growing Northern Virginia, snarled traffic is the chief concern of chambers of commerce and Mr. McAuliffe was able to portray himself as pro-business and bipartisan.

Although a majority of female voters chose Mr. McDonnell four years ago, Mr. Cuccinelli trailed Mr. McAuliffe among women by nearly 10 percentage points. Nearly seven in 10 unmarried women supported Mr. McAuliffe.

Both Planned Parenthood and the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, poured money into the race. Abortion rights groups created graphic television ads linking the Republican ticket to a failed state bill in 2012 that would have required vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortions.

The McAuliffe campaign pounded on Mr. Cuccinelli’s support for failed “personhood” bills that could have banned some common forms of birth control, and for being one of only three attorneys general in the country to oppose the federal Violence Against Women Act.

Six months ago, the race seemed Mr. Cuccinelli’s to lose. He was a conservative of impeccable credentials and a national figure because of the lawsuit over the president’s health care law in 2010. Mr. McAuliffe had drawn an unserious self-portrait in his 2007 memoir, “What a Party!,” including a story about leaving his wife, Dorothy, in the car with their newborn child to duck into a Democratic fund-raiser.

Mr. McAuliffe’s previous bid for governor, in 2009, ended in a humiliating defeat in the primary after he was accused of being a carpetbagger. His effort to strengthen his business ties to Virginia through an electric car company, GreenTech, backfired when he set up production in Mississippi and news reports revealed the company was the target of federal investigators.

But Mr. Cuccinelli was unable to profit from the tarnishing of Mr. McAuliffe because the attorney general had his own problem with a political gifts scandal emanating from the governor. A benefactor of Mr. McDonnell’s who lavished him and his wife with a Rolex watch and other favors also gave Mr. Cuccinelli and his family vacations at a lake home.

Mr. Cuccinelli secured the Republican nomination in May by packing the state party with his supporters, who chose to skip a primary in favor of a nominating convention, ensuring a more ideological slate of candidates.

In the middle of the federal government shutdown, which hit hard in Virginia, with its many federal workers and its defense industry, Mr. Cuccinelli appeared at a family values rally with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the architect of the shutdown. In exit polls, about a third of voters said the shutdown had affected someone in their household, and most of them voted for Mr. McAuliffe.

Mr. Cuccinelli spent the final weeks of the campaign barnstorming with national Tea Party stars. He appeared on election eve with the former presidential candidate Ron Paul, meant to call home votes from a third-party candidate, Robert Sarvis, a libertarian.

Meanwhile, with money pouring into Mr. McAuliffe’s campaign, thanks to his ties to major donors, including supporters of the Clintons, he set off an avalanche of negative ads. Mr. McAuliffe outspent his opponent by nearly 75 percent, and beginning in late summer drove up Mr. Cuccinelli’s unfavorable ratings, where they remained.

Mr. McAuliffe ran a disciplined campaign, touring all 23 community colleges in the state to highlight work force development and keeping his message tightly on job creation.

In the last week, Mr. Cuccinelli seized the chance to pivot to the disastrous debut of the federal health insurance marketplace. The issue may have narrowed Mr. McAuliffe’s victory margin, but in the end it was not enough.

Mr. McAuliffe broke a 36-year pattern in which Virginia’s governor, picked the year after the presidential election, came from the party out of power in the White House. The political scientist who first remarked on the trend, Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia, ascribed it to a natural tendency toward buyer’s remorse. But this year, as unpopular as Mr. Obama and his health care law may be with many Virginians, “dislike of Cuccinelli is even stronger,” Mr. Sabato said.

Dalia Sussman contributed reporting from New York.

    Terry McAuliffe, Democrat, Is Elected Governor of Virginia in Tight Race,
    NYT, 5.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/us/politics/
    mcauliffe-is-elected-governor-in-virginia.html

Chris Christie

Re-elected Governor of New Jersey

November 5, 2013
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE
and JONATHAN MARTIN

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey won re-election by a crushing margin on Tuesday, a victory that vaulted him to the front ranks of Republican presidential contenders and made him his party’s foremost proponent of pragmatism over ideology.

Mr. Christie declared that his decisive win should be a lesson for the nation’s broken political system and his feuding party: In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by over 700,000, Mr. Christie won a majority of the votes of women and Hispanics and made impressive inroads among younger voters and blacks — groups that Republicans nationally have struggled to attract.

The governor prevailed despite holding positions contrary to those of many New Jersey voters on several key issues, including same-sex marriage, abortion rights and the minimum wage, and despite an economic recovery that has trailed the rest of the country.

He attracted a broad coalition by campaigning as a straight-talking, even swaggering, leader who could reach across the aisle to solve problems.

“I know that if we can do this in Trenton, N.J., then maybe the folks in Washington, D.C., should tune in their TVs right now and see how it’s done,” Mr. Christie told a packed crowd at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, where his musical idol, Bruce Springsteen, holds holiday concerts, and where red and blue lighting gave the gathering a presidential campaign-like glow.

The governor all but lectured Republicans about how to appeal to groups beyond their base. “We don’t just show up in the places where we’re comfortable, we show up in the places we’re uncomfortable,” he said, adding, “You don’t just show up 6 months before an election.”

Around the country, Republicans alarmed by the surging grass roots support for the Tea Party wing were cheered by Mr. Christie’s success, saying they hope their party will learn not only from the size of Mr. Christie’s margin over Barbara Buono, a Democratic state senator, but also from the makeup of his support.

“We’ll be led back by our governors, and Chris Christie is now at the forefront of that resurgence,” said Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

“He’s proved that a conservative Republican can get votes from Hispanics and African-Americans, that a pro-life governor can get votes from women. This means that those voters are available to us, that we’re not shut out demographically or geographically — that it’s worth the effort.”

Mr. Christie’s strategy of bipartisanship and outreach deliberately echoed that of another Republican governor who seized the White House after eight years of Democratic control: George W. Bush.

“We work together and they don’t,” Mr. Christie said in an interview on Tuesday morning, contrasting Trenton and Washington. “It’s not like we like each other any more than they do. I got plenty of Democrats I don’t like here and that don’t like me. But we’ve made the decision that we’re going to work together.”

In the interview, Mr. Christie said intelligent voices were being drowned out in Washington, and described the effort led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to cut off funding for President Obama’s health care program as “a monumental failure.”

The swell of national attention around Mr. Christie had grown in the run-up to Election Day, as network cameras filmed his every move — he had a CNN microphone clipped to his tie as he campaigned on Tuesday morning at the Peterpank Diner in Central New Jersey. His campaign bus had been swarmed by people seeking autographs on photos of the governor at the White House, on the cover of Time magazine, and even with his wife, Mary Pat, on their wedding day. Some clearly hoped to offer the souvenirs later for sale.

Mr. Christie’s national profile will only increase later this month as he assumes leadership of the Republican Governors Association, which gives him sway over which state candidates the party will support, allowing him to rack up favors with other Republicans and create relationships with local leaders in key presidential states.

In the interview, Mr. Christie said he would be appearing frequently in “places like Ohio and Michigan and Florida,” all states with incumbent Republican governors up for re-election next year. He has also told South Carolina Republicans that he wants to help Senator Lindsey Graham, who is facing a conservative primary challenge next year. And in New Hampshire, which has the country’s first presidential primary, the national committeeman, Stephen Duprey, said he was inviting Mr. Christie to the state to discuss policy and to raise money for the party.

Still, Mr. Christie has to be governor of New Jersey, and that may complicate his plans to run for the presidency.

He has benefited in his first term from having one of the most powerful governorships in the country. But in a campaign for the presidency, that power also puts him in conflict with rules forbidding him to raise money from Wall Street. His advisers think he could get around that rule by allowing independent political groups to raise the money. But he will also face challenges in running the state.

His signature accomplishment of his first term was working with Democrats, who have majorities in both houses of the State Legislature, to commit to a schedule to pay down pension costs. In his second term, he will have to actually make the payments, which balloon over the next three years. Numerous commissions, reports and ratings agencies have warned that he may be unable to do this without raising taxes or making deep cuts.

His in-your-face style has won over New Jersey so far, but not everyone is at ease with it. Over the weekend, Mr. Christie was caught on camera wagging his finger at a teacher who challenged his cuts to classrooms, a moment reminiscent of the presidential campaign of 2012, when Mitt Romney’s advisers were alarmed by a video of Mr. Christie shaking an ice cream cone at a critic he encountered on the Jersey Shore.

“I am who I am, and that’s why people react to me differently,” Mr. Christie said in the interview. ”I’m not going to be giving these sound-bite-type of answers.”

Mr. Christie’s gains among black and Hispanic voters at the polls are the result of an aggressive, years-long effort: He has held more than 100 town hall-style meetings, including several in predominantly black areas that he lost in 2009.

For example, he won over Michael Blunt, a black Democrat and mayor of Chesilhurst, a largely black borough in South Jersey, with relentless wooing. Mr. Blunt, who recalled how Mr. Christie held a town hall in his community, steered more municipal aid to it and invited him to a Juneteenth celebration, marking the end of slavery, at the State House, impressing him with his knowledge of the holiday. And the governor invited black elected officials to Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion near Princeton, and told them how a black friend in college took him to a historically black campus to demonstrate how it felt to be in the minority.

“If a person has no problem going in enemy territory to explain his policies, that person we really need to look at,” said Mr. Blunt, who was a delegate for Mr. Obama last year.

Mr. Christie nominated a Hispanic justice to the State Supreme Court, and in recent weeks, he told Hispanic students that he might reverse himself to support allowing students who were brought to the United States as children to pay in-state tuition at the state’s colleges and universities.

He ended his final campaign swing with a rally in Union City, which has the highest Hispanic population in the state. He also spent his last day campaigning with Susana Martinez of New Mexico, the first Hispanic woman to be elected a governor.

Exit polls showed that those strategies paid off. Exit polling conducted by Edison Research showed that Mr. Christie won the Hispanic vote and won over a significantly higher proportion of black voters than in 2009.

Mr. Christie increased his margin to win among women, despite running against two women, Ms. Buono and her candidate for lieutenant governor, Milly Silva. (His running mate also is a woman, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno.)

Unlike some ambitious politicians, Mr. Christie, who is 51, has not been coy about his interest in higher office, and New Jersey residents seem comfortable with it.

One man proclaimed to the governor on Tuesday morning that the next time they shook hands, “it will be Mr. President.” A woman was even blunter as the governor passed her at the diner. “We need a Jersey attitude in the White House,” said Irene Fulton, a retiree from Old Bridge, who added, “We don’t put up with any crap.”

During the governor’s victory speech at Convention Hall, an audience member screamed out, “Chris Christie for president!” setting off cheers. The governor deadpanned: “I guess there is an open bar tonight — welcome to New Jersey.”

Allison Kopicki contributed reporting.

    Chris Christie Re-elected Governor of New Jersey, NYT, 5.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/nyregion/
    chris-christie-re-elected-governor-of-new-jersey.html

Terry McAuliffe, Democrat,

Is Elected Governor of Virginia

in Tight Race

November 5, 2013
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

Dalia Sussman contributed reporting from New York.

    Terry McAuliffe, Democrat, Is Elected Governor of Virginia in Tight Race,
    NYT, 5.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/us/politics/
    mcauliffe-is-elected-governor-in-virginia.html

De Blasio Is Elected New York City Mayor

November 5, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL BARBARO
and DAVID W. CHEN

Bill de Blasio, who transformed himself from a little-known occupant of an obscure office into the fiery voice of New York’s disillusionment with a new gilded age, was elected the city’s 109th mayor on Tuesday.

His landslide victory, stretching from the working-class precincts of central Brooklyn to the suburban streets of southeast Queens, amounted to a forceful rejection of the hard-nosed, business-minded style of governance that reigned at City Hall for the past two decades and a sharp leftward turn for the nation’s largest metropolis.

Mr. de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, defeated Joseph J. Lhota, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

It was the most sweeping victory in a mayor’s race since 1985, when Edward I. Koch won by 68 points, and it gave Mr. de Blasio what he said was an unmistakable mandate to pursue his liberal agenda.

“My fellow New Yorkers, today, you spoke out loudly and clearly for a new direction for our city,” Mr. de Blasio, a 52-year-old Democrat, said at a raucous party in Park Slope, Brooklyn, at which his teenage children danced onstage and the candidate greeted the crowd in English, Spanish and even a few words of Italian.

“Make no mistake: The people of this city have chosen a progressive path, and tonight we set forth on it, together.”

In Manhattan, Mr. Lhota, a 59-year-old Republican, quieted boos from his disappointed supporters as he conceded the race from behind a wooden lectern at a hotel in Murray Hill. “I wish the outcome had been different,” he said. He struck a defiant tone, mocking Mr. de Blasio’s campaign slogan, “a tale of two cities,” by quipping that “despite what you might have heard, we are one city,” and adding, “I do hope the mayor-elect understands this, before it’s too late.”

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 three-term 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 15-year-old son, Dante, who has a towering Afro.

In interviews on Election Day, voters across the five boroughs said his message had captured their deep-seated grievances and yearning for change.

Darrian Smith, a 48-year-old custodian at a public school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, said his vote for Mr. de Blasio was a plea to end the widespread police searches, known as the stop-and-frisk tactic, that have repeatedly ensnared him and his African-American neighbors.

“When I look at Mr. de Blasio, I see a bright light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.

Jon Kopita, an educational consultant from Greenwich Village, called Mr. de Blasio the best hope for slowing the growth of luxury condominiums that crowd his Manhattan neighborhood.

“If it just becomes a rich person’s city, then I might as well just go live somewhere else,” he said. “It’s time to go in a different direction.”

The traditional Republican Party playbook that had propelled Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Bloomberg to victory in an overwhelmingly Democratic city — reaching across party lines to voters worried about crime, education and quality of life — felt outdated this campaign season.

Mr. de Blasio will become the first Democrat to lead New York in a generation, ending his party’s two-decade-long exile from City Hall.

“It’s huge,” said John H. Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York, who added that Mr. de Blasio had shown that Democrats were again willing to entrust City Hall to one of their own.

“Liberalism,” Mr. Mollenkopf said, “is not dead in New York City.”

Mr. Lhota, a former deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration and onetime Wall Street banker, had entered the race with great fanfare and promise: as a moderate Republican, a battle-tested manager and an outsize personality, known for quoting “The Godfather” and posting tipsy messages on Twitter.

But the first-time candidate proved listless on the stump, prone to a monotone delivery. His attacks on Mr. de Blasio, as a “socialist” who would invite a return to crime-riddled streets, had a shrill quality. And despite his deep ties to the business world, he struggled to persuade donors to take a chance on him in the face of daunting poll numbers.

In the end, he raised just $3.4 million, a third of the amount collected by Mr. de Blasio.

“He just hit a brick wall,” said Phil Ragusa, the chairman of the Republican Party in Queens. “You have to be well funded. That is a reality. Joe was not.”

Mr. Lhota’s most ardent supporters conceded that he had failed to make a convincing case for himself. “He just wasn’t compelling enough,” said Regina Kessler, 58, who lives on the Upper East Side.

On Tuesday, Mr. Lhota put on a brave face. He ate his favorite breakfast of sausage, eggs and cheese on a bagel; his wife donned her good-luck red, white and blue scarf; and he told a radio host that he was busy writing a victory speech. But privately he had no illusions, acknowledging that he planned to conduct what he called a post-campaign “autopsy” to figure out what went wrong.

Like many New Yorkers, he was taken aback by Mr. de Blasio’s improbable rise. Raised a Boston Red Sox fan in Massachusetts, Mr. de Blasio embraced the cause of leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua as a young man, married a woman who once identified as lesbian, and has never managed an organization larger than 300 people.

But Mr. de Blasio, a longtime political operative who ran campaigns for Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles B. Rangel, oversaw a highly disciplined political machine that committed few errors and took little for granted, in stark contrast with Mr. Lhota.

On Election Day, Mr. de Blasio had amassed around 10,000 volunteers at 40 locations to turn out voters; Mr. Lhota recruited about 500 workers at nine locations.

The coordinated outreach paid off, with Mr. de Blasio capturing majority support from voters of all races, genders, ages, religions, incomes and education levels, according to exit polls by Edison Research.

Largely overlooked on Tuesday was the man who has dominated the city for the past 12 years and whose legacy was a divisive theme of the campaign: Mayor Bloomberg.

He quietly cast his vote at an Upper East Side school, amid reminders that his time at the pinnacle of municipal power was drawing to a close. When Mr. Bloomberg, dressed in a crimson tie and a crisp winter coat, showed up, the poll worker had a question. What was his first name, again?

As he left, clutching a loaf of banana bread and a plastic cup of coffee, a little boy waved at his king-size S.U.V., and yelled.

“Bye, bye, mayor!”

Reporting was contributed by Michael M. Grynbaum, Javier C. Hernández, Thomas Kaplan, Kate Taylor and Julie Turkewitz.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 6, 2013

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect age

for the Republican mayoral candidate, Joseph J. Lhota.

Mr. Lhota is 59, not 57.

    De Blasio Is Elected New York City Mayor, NYT, 5.11.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/06/nyregion/
    de-blasio-is-elected-new-york-city-mayor.html

Wrong Side of History

October 3, 2013
9:00 pm
The New York Times
Opinionator -
A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web
By TIMOTHY EGAN

Sarah Palin finally got her death panels — a direct blow from the Republican House. In shutting down the government, leaving 800,000 people without a paycheck and draining the economy of $300 million a day, the Party of Madness also took away last-chance cancer trials for children at the National Institutes of Health.

And now that the pain that was dismissed as a trifle on Monday, a “slimdown” according to the chuckleheads at Fox News, is revealed as tragic by mid-week, the very radicals who caused the havoc are trying to say it’s not their fault.

It’s too late. They flunked hostage-taking. About 30 or so Republicans in the House, bunkered in gerrymandered districts while breathing the oxygen of delusion, are now part of a cast of miscreants who have stood firmly on the wrong side of history. The headline, today and 50 years from now, will be the same: Republicans closed the government to keep millions of their fellow Americans from getting affordable health care.

They are not righteous rebels or principled provocateurs. They are not constitutionalists, using the ruling framework built by the founders. Just the opposite: they are a militant fringe of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government trying to nullify an established law by extortion. This is not the design of the Constitution.

Nor are they Martin Luther King Jr., or Rosa Parks or Winston Churchill — preposterous comparisons made on the floor of Congress by those whose only real fight is with progress.

In truth, they are the Know-Nothings from the 1850s who fought Irish Catholics and other castoffs from distant lands, vowing to keep them from becoming citizens. Their incarnation today is the Tea Party Republicans who call Latinos drug mules and would rather strangle the federal government than take up immigration reform.

They are the opponents of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, labeling what are now the two most popular government programs as socialism that would destroy the country. They are the foes of science and modernism, denying evolution, climate change and, on election nights, math.

Over the years, whether Democrat, Republican, Whig or Dixiecrat, the members of this club have one thing in common: they are left at the train station of destiny, and never realize it until it’s too late.

So of course they have no exit tragedy. “We have to get something out of this,” said Representative Martin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana. “And I don’t know what that even is.” Truer words have not been spoken by any member of the Crazy Caucus since they took the House in 2010.

You have to step back from the breathless tick-tock of the 24-hour news cycle to put this grim chapter in larger perspective. “Can you remember a time in your lifetime when a major political party was just sitting around, begging for America to fail?” So asked a perplexed Bill Clinton a few days ago.

The answer is no. What kind of failure are we talking about? Not just to equity markets, jobs, the mechanics of daily life in the world’s biggest economy. The shutdown stops research on Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, cancer treatments. Two-thirds of the employees at the Centers for Disease Control were sent home. Many food inspectors, people who train air traffic controllers, anti-terrorism experts — all furloughed. And shed a tear for Yosemite National Park on its 123rd birthday Monday. America’s Best Idea — as the parks are called — couldn’t compete with America’s Worst Idea, the Tea Party Republicans.

And let’s never forget that these sacrifices, real and lasting, are being made for one thing: to block health care reform. Obamacare, when its component parts are explained to people, is enormously popular. Take one of the most profound features of the law — the ban on denying insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Nearly half of all Americans fit that category. The insurances exchanges, for all their computer glitches, are flooded with interest.

We know now why Senator Ted Cruz, the most hated man in Washington, said he fears that once Obamacare is up and running people will like it — and then it will be too late for the obstructionists.

Politically, the shutdown is terrible for a party trying to rebrand itself. When Bobby Jindal said Republicans have to “stop being the party of stupid,” he swallowed a teaspoon of common sense. That’s been washed away by a river of stupid.

This week’s Quinnipiac Poll found 72 percent of Americans opposed to shutting down the government to halt the Affordable Care Act. When asked to pick a party in a generic Congressional matchup, those surveyed chose Democrats over Republicans, 43 percent to 34 — the widest measure in recent polling.

Those numbers won’t penetrate the gerrymandered fortresses that produced the people who have made our democracy a laughing stock of the world.

“We’re right,” crowed Representative Steve King of Iowa.

“We can always win,” seconded Representative Raúl Labrador of Idaho.

Say it enough times, and it’ll be true, like Karl Rove’s gasping on election night that Obama had not yet won. But the die is cast. They wrecked the car, dug their own grave; no matter what you call it, history’s verdict came early.

Wrong Side of History, NYT, 3.10.2013,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/wrong-side-of-history/

For First Time on Record,

Black Voting Rate Outpaced

Rate for Whites in 2012

May 8, 2013
The New York Times
By SARAH WHEATON

WASHINGTON — The turnout rate of black voters surpassed the rate for whites for the first time on record in 2012, as more black voters went to the polls than in 2008 and fewer whites did, according to a Census Bureau report released Wednesday.

The survey also found that Hispanics and Asians continue to turn out at much lower rates than other groups, and that women turn out at higher rates than men. The increase in black turnout was driven in significant part by more votes from black women.

According to the Census report, 66.2 percent of eligible blacks voted in the 2012 election, compared with 64.1 percent of eligible non-Hispanic whites. An estimated two million fewer white Americans voted in 2012 than in 2008, just as about 1.8 million more blacks went to the polls, more than 90 percent of them voting to re-elect President Obama, exit polls showed.

“In 2008, we changed the guard. In 2012, we guard the change,” said Michael Blake, who ran the Obama campaign’s effort to reach out to black and minority voters, Operation Vote.

The overall turnout rate nationwide was 61.8 percent in 2012, a decline from 63.6 percent four years earlier. Researchers cautioned that their estimates might overstate how many people voted across all categories, because they are based on surveys in which people were asked whether they had voted — a “socially desirable” activity.

Some researchers cautioned against treating 2012 as a watershed moment for the black vote. For example, Michael P. McDonald, an associate professor at George Mason University — using the same data but with a slightly different calculation — determined that black voters first turned out at a higher rate than whites in 2008.

The increase in black turnout seemed to stem from both energized voters and a successful voter-mobilization effort by the Obama campaign and civil rights groups. Many black voters were motivated not only to protect the president, political organizers said, but also to demonstrate their own right to vote.

In several states, Republican legislators tried to increase voter-ID requirements, limit voting times and make registration more difficult, efforts that civil rights groups aggressively opposed.

“We are accustomed to people trying to deny us things, and I think sometimes you wake the sleeping giant, and that’s what happened here,” said Marvin Randolph, the N.A.A.C.P.’s senior vice president for campaigns.

Mr. Randolph cited an Obama campaign memo boasting that the black early vote was up by at least 17 percent in a series of battleground states that offered the option, including Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Colorado and North Carolina. “They stood in line so they wouldn’t get their vote denied,” Mr. Randolph added.

But geographic figures also suggest that black voters flocked to the polls even with little nudging from political organizers. Among the states where blacks had the highest turnout rates relative to whites were Republican bastions where neither campaign devoted many resources, like Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

Thom File, the Census report’s author, said in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday, “Blacks for the first time in 2012 actually voted at rates higher than their eligibility would indicate.”

It remains unclear how lasting the increase in black turnout will be. Mr. Randolph acknowledged that 2016, when a black candidate may not be at the top of the ticket, would present more of a test.

Dan Pfeiffer, a top adviser to Mr. Obama, said in a Twitter message that it was “not written in stone” that the next Democratic nominee would generate the same enthusiasm, calling it a challenge for 2016 and beyond.

Democrats also face the challenge of raising turnout among Latino and Asian-American voters, both of whom voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Obama, while also holding on to their support as Republicans woo them.

For Republicans, the new data showed that the newly diverse electorate of recent years is likely to become only more so. In 2012, 73.7 percent of voters were white, according to the census, down from 82.5 percent in 1996.

The key to increasing Hispanics’ share of the vote is “closing the registration gap,” said Clarissa Martinez, director of civic engagement and immigration for NCLR, a Latino organization also known as the National Council of La Raza. The study, which showed that fewer than half of eligible Latinos voted in 2012, foreshadows their “tremendous additional potential,” Ms. Martinez said.

The study also found a significant gender gap, with women voting at a rate 4 percentage points higher than men. Among blacks, the gap was 9 percentage points.

    For First Time on Record, Black Voting Rate Outpaced Rate for Whites in 2012,
    NYT, 8.5.2013,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/us/
    politics/rate-of-black-voters-surpassed-that-for-whites-in-2012.html

Arizona’s Barrier to the Right to Vote

March 18, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Arizona’s Proposition 200, passed in 2004, prohibits local officials from registering any would-be voter who does not provide “satisfactory evidence of United States citizenship.” That requirement conflicts with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Act, which set up a national registration system for federal elections.

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether states have the power under the federal law to add restrictions to voter registration. They clearly do not. The justices should reject Arizona’s law as invalid and avoid recreating the problem that the federal law was intended to fix.

Congress sought to remedy the “complicated maze of laws and procedures” passed by state and local governments that kept 40 percent of eligible voters from registering. The 1993 law allows voters to sign up to vote in federal elections when they apply for a driver’s license or by mailing in a federal form on which they swear they are citizens under penalty of perjury. The law also says that a state must “accept and use the mail voter registration application form prescribed.” Arizona’s statute directly conflicts with the federal law by imposing the additional requirement of proof of citizenship.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down the statute as being pre-empted by the federal law. Proposition 200’s purpose is to combat undocumented immigration, but the state produced no evidence of undocumented immigrants registering or voting in Arizona. As a brief from a group of state and local elections officials from around the country said, “Efforts by noncitizens to register and vote are exceedingly rare” and do not justify making it harder for voters to register. Arizona produced evidence that in 2005 and 2007, only 19 noncitizens registered to vote — out of 2,734,108 registered state voters.

In the same period, Arizona rejected the registrations of 31,550 people. Most of them — 87 percent of the Hispanics, 93 percent of the others — listed the United States as their birthplace. The recorder’s office in Arizona’s largest county said that most of those it rejected were citizens who lacked required identification.

The Constitution’s elections clause says that states shall prescribe “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives,” but that “Congress may at any time by law make or alter” those regulations. As long as Congress has acted within “the ample limits of the election clause’s grant of authority,” the Supreme Court has said, what Congress does in the realm of voting is paramount because “the framers envisioned a uniform national system.”

Congress’s explicit purpose was to strengthen this voting system by streamlining the process for registering to vote. The Supreme Court should strike down the unwarranted and conflicting Arizona law, which eviscerates the federal effort to extend the Constitution’s fundamental right to every eligible voter.

Arizona’s Barrier to the Right to Vote, NYT, 18.3.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/opinion/arizonas-barrier-to-the-right-to-vote.html

‘Suicide Conservatives’

February 8, 2013
The New York Times
By CHARLES M. BLOW

There used to be a political truism: Democrats fall in love, while Republicans fall in line.

That’s no longer true. Not in this moment. Democrats have learned to fall in love and fall in line. Republicans are just falling apart.

Last week, the opening salvos were launched in a very public and very nasty civil war between establishment Republicans and Tea Party supporters when it was reported that Karl Rove was backing a new group, the Conservative Victory Project, to counter the Tea Party’s selection of loopy congressional candidates who lose in general elections.

The Tea Party was having none of it. It sees Rove’s group as a brazen attack on the Tea Party movement, which it is. Rove sees winning as a practical matter. The Tea Party counts victory in layers of philosophical purity.

Politico reported this week that an unnamed “senior Republican operative” said that one of the party’s biggest problems was “ ‘suicide conservatives, who would rather lose elections than win seats with moderates.’ ”

Democrats could be the ultimate beneficiaries of this tiff. Of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2014, 20 are held by Democrats. Seven of those 20 are in states that President Obama lost in the last presidential election. Republicans would have to pick up only a handful of seats to take control of the chamber.

But some in the Tea Party are threatening that if their candidate is defeated in the primaries by a candidate backed by Rove’s group, they might still run the Tea Party candidate in the general election. That would virtually guarantee a Democratic victory.

Sal Russo, a Tea Party strategist, told Politico: “We discourage our people from supporting third-party candidates by saying ‘that’s a big mistake. We shouldn’t do that.’ ” He added: “But if the position [Rove’s allies] take is rule or ruin — well, two can play that game. And if we get pushed, we’re not going to be able to keep the lid on that.”

The skirmish speaks to a broader problem: a party that has lost its way and can’t rally around a unified, coherent vision of what it wants to be when it grows up.

The traditional Republican message doesn’t work. Rhetorically, the G.O.P. is the party of calamity. The sky is always falling. Everything is broken. Freedoms are eroding. Tomorrow is dimmer than today.

In Republicans’ world, we must tighten our belts until we crush our spines. We must take a road to prosperity that runs through the desert of austerity. We must cut to grow. Republicans are the last guardians against bad governance.

But how can they sell this message to a public that has rejected it in the last two presidential elections?

Some say keep the terms but soften the tone.

A raft of Republicans, many of them possible contenders in 2016, have been trying this approach.

Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, speaking at a Republican National Committee meeting last month, chastised his party for being “the stupid party” that’s “in love with zeros,” even as he insisted, “I am not one of those who believe we should moderate, equivocate, or otherwise abandon our principles.”

Jindal’s plan, like that of many other Republicans, boils down to two words: talk differently.

Other Republicans, like Marco Rubio, seem to want to go further. They understand that the party must behave differently. He is among a group of senators who recently put forward a comprehensive immigration proposal that would offer a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country.

This is a position Democrats have advocated, and it’s a position that Republicans have to accept if they want Hispanic support — and a chance of winning a presidential election.

The Tea Party crowd did not seem pleased with that plan. Glenn Beck, the self-described “rodeo clown” of the right, said:

“You’ve got John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and now Marco Rubio joining them because Marco Rubio just has to win elections. I’m done. I’m done. Learn the Constitution. Somebody has to keep a remnant of the Constitution alive.”

For Beck’s wing of the party, moderation is surrender, and surrender is death. It seems to want to go further out on a limb that’s getting ever more narrow. For that crowd, being a Tea Party supporter is more a religion than a political philosophy. They believe so deeply and fervently in it that they see no need for either message massage or actual compromise.

While most Democrats and Independents want politicians to compromise, Republicans don’t, according to a January report by the Pew Research Center. The zealots have a chokehold on that party, and they’re sucking the life — and common sense — out of it.

For this brand of Republican, there is victory in self-righteous defeat.

‘Suicide Conservatives’, NYT, 8.2.2013,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/opinion/blow-suicide-conservatives.html