NY-09, Special Election Thread

[Verily]

Mmhmm, I think a better question would be whether this will hurt his mayoral run.

Short answer: It's dead.

Longer answer: Despite being a liberal himself, Weiner's political position in NYC has always been fairly dependent on support from relatively conservative groups like the Russians and Orthodox Jews as well as in general older whites living in outer Brooklyn and Queens. Meanwhile, his chief rival for the mayoralty, Christine Quinn, has more backing from the white liberals, partially because she represents a lot of them and is from Manhattan while Weiner is from Queens. Now, the scandal probably hurts Weiner at least somewhat among the crunchy-granola crowd in inner Brooklyn and Manhattan (the misogyny perspective), but more importantly it crushes his support among the conservative outer-borough whites. And, other than that she's a lesbian, politically Quinn is a better fit ideologically for those voters anyway. Although, with Weiner clearly out of the picture, while Quinn is temporarily the frontrunner, I'm sure someone else will enter the race to challenge her. (Bill Thompson is a huge joke and totally incompetent and could not hope to win a primary.) The election is a long time from now, obviously.

[Verily]

Mmhmm, I think a better question would be whether this will hurt his mayoral run.

Short answer: It's dead.

Longer answer: Despite being a liberal himself, Weiner's political position in NYC has always been fairly dependent on support from relatively conservative groups like the Russians and Orthodox Jews as well as in general older whites living in outer Brooklyn and Queens. Meanwhile, his chief rival for the mayoralty, Christine Quinn, has more backing from the white liberals, partially because she represents a lot of them and is from Manhattan while Weiner is from Queens. Now, the scandal probably hurts Weiner at least somewhat among the crunchy-granola crowd in inner Brooklyn and Manhattan (the misogyny perspective), but more importantly it crushes his support among the conservative outer-borough whites. And, other than that she's a lesbian, politically Quinn is a better fit ideologically for those voters anyway. Although, with Weiner clearly out of the picture, while Quinn is temporarily the frontrunner, I'm sure someone else will enter the race to challenge her. (Bill Thompson is a huge joke and totally incompetent and could not hope to win a primary.) The election is a long time from now, obviously.

Why would crunchy-granola crowd hate Weiner now just because of his Twitter picture? They are not religious conservatives you know.

Middle-aged feminists are perhaps the group most disgusted by cheating in the country, much more so than religious conservatives. You are discounting the 40-year-old white liberal women who make up a very large percentage of the vote in places like Park Slope and the Upper West Side.

Obviously it's a fairly small segment of the population, but it's a group among whom he probably would have done reasonably well before but would not do well among now.

[Verily]

I don't think the Orthodox are a big deal, they voted almost 100% for McCain anyway and he still lost the seat by a wide margin despite plenty of other votes not being fond of Obama.

Michael Bloomberg won 70% of the vote in NY-9.  It's a competitive seat, potentially.

Orthodox voters break 80-20 or 90-10 instead of 55-45, so they can be the most influential swing voters sometimes

Why are we so obsessed with the Orthodox? There are virtually no Orthodox in this seat. The Orthodox in Boro Park live west of McDonald Ave, which is the western edge of this district. There's the small community in Kew Gardens Hills, but they're no more than a couple thousand votes.

The Republicans in this seat are Italians and Irish in places like Howard Beach, Middle Village and Marine Park, and Russians in Brighton Beach. Losing sight of that is a sure way for both the Democrats and the Republicans to screw up. Bloomberg did well in this seat because he dominated the South Asian, Filipino and Reform Jewish votes and did well with Hispanics, groups Obama won and Democrats typically win.

[Verily]

Weird. His Assembly district and former City Council district only barely overlap with the CD. (He's from Jamaica Estates.) I guess that's good for Crowley, though; sets up a primary fight between Weprin and Ackerman in 2012.

[Verily]

Dov Hikind endorses Turner to keep the momentum building.

Does this mean much in the district? From my own, minimal research on the guy, he seems somewhat prominent (and asinine. He's one of the clowns that said that "The Passion of the Christ" would cause anti-semetic and bigoted rioting. How'd that work out, Dov?).

No one other than the Orthodox care what Dov Hikind thinks. I doubt his endorsement has any real impact other than to indicate which way the Orthodox vote was going (which we already knew, and the Orthodox vote in this district was around 90% McCain in 2008 anyway).

[Verily]

I'm still not convinced the orthodox Jew vote itself would have turned this district. What % of the district are they again? The catholic vote is more interesting imho. Not to say gay marriage didn't have an impact with them, but perhaps the general state of the economy and the resulting approval of Obama because of it had something to do with it?

Not to mention gay marriage is not an issue for the Republicans to run on nationwide. Well, maybe 2012 will be the last cycle for that. Beyond that you will start to get majorly f'ed. Trust me.

The key point is that McCain already won over 90% of the Orthodox Jewish vote in this district in 2008. They couldn't be the deciding factor because they didn't have any more room to swing (although I suppose there might have been a turnout differential). Any talk on here of marriage is just noise.