Mayor de Blasio is up for re-election next year, and he’s running against Donald Trump. But the president-elect and the mayor have a lot in common, an uncomfortable fact for both of them.
Days after the election, the mayor tried to raise money off Trump’s victory.
De Blasio sent a letter warning supporters that “if the election taught us anything, it’s that we must be prepared for everything . . . We have a lot of tools at our disposal to protect the values and needs of the vast majority of New Yorkers.”
“Both Trump and de Blasio grasped, as their rivals didn’t, that voters were suffering from one ailment: acute economic anxiety.”
Yes, de Blasio is acting as if Trump’s election was a catastrophe — just as many of the mayor’s opponents thought his victory spelled immediate doom for New York.
But in one sense, Trump’s win — like de Blasio’s — was comforting, whether you supported him or opposed him. It means the law of politics still holds: The stronger candidate, the one who spoke more credibly to crucial voters on their concerns, won. If you drop a glass, it breaks. Sad, but wouldn’t it be weirder if it didn’t?
Despite fears that Trump’s voters are racist misogynists and de Blasio’s are irredeemable communists, that’s all there was to it.
True, both Trump and de Blasio were weak candidates. Trump was an aging reality-TV star whose failed casino ventures had eclipsed his 1980s successes. De Blasio was the city’s elected public advocate, a dead-end post, with no policy accomplishments.
But their opponents were even weaker. Both Trump and de Blasio grasped, as their rivals didn’t, that voters were suffering from one ailment: acute economic anxiety.
Trump won because voters were worried that Chinese and Indian and Mexican workers had been taking their jobs — and no one was doing anything about it. De Blasio won because the bosses of those Chinese, Indian and Mexican workers were taking our apartments — and nobody cared.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” was not that different from de Blasio’s “tale of two cities”: Both were simple, powerful narratives. And neither man suffered from running a negative campaign: de Blasio running against the rich, and Trump, well, running against the rich.
When people already feel bad, negativity sells. In New York, the city’s Independent Budget Office reported last week, most voters haven’t received a raise that’s adequate to keep up with rising costs since 2007.
We don’t look much like the rest of the country, but we do have that in common.
Trump grandstanded on saving Carrier air-conditioning jobs, yet de Blasio did plenty of grandstanding himself. Remember when he got himself arrested protesting the closure of Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn two months before the primary?
The difference is that Trump’s grandstanding worked. He convinced Carrier to keep half of the 2,000 employees it was going to lay off. LICH, though, is being turned into luxury condos.
De Blasio, like Trump, promised a lot, from guaranteeing universal pre-K to ending the city’s perennial affordable-housing and homelessness crises. Pre-K was easy, just as it will be easy for Trump to push some paid-parental-leave act through Congress.
Housing and homelessness are much harder, because de Blasio is fighting against powerful economic and social forces.
Trump was clever, in that some powerful trends are on his side: Immigration from Mexico peaked a decade ago; companies have already slowed their outsourcing of jobs, as wages and other costs rise in China.
Finally, both men are heavily disliked, or at least disapproved of — and for pretty good reasons. A November Quinnipiac poll found that 49 percent of New Yorkers don’t think de Blasio deserves re-election, while 39 percent think he does.
That’s likely to get worse, as grand juries consider indicting top de Blasio aides on bribery. But unless the mayor himself is indicted, de Blasio foes can’t rely on negative news to oust the mayor.
Nor can they rely on disaster: De Blasio hasn’t destroyed New York over three years, just as Trump is unlikely to destroy America over the next four years.
Neither man is practically or politically stupid: De Blasio has kept crime down, because he knows high crime is the surest way for a Democrat in New York to lose.
And both the city and the country can withstand a lot of bad leadership.
That means that anyone who wants to beat Trump in four years will need the same elusive ingredient they lacked this time: Someone who can win.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post
