Mark Green made the craven decision to support giving Guiliani a three-month "extension" on his term.
When he saw outraged liberal support defecting to Ferrer (including the key 1199 union), he went for the low road and ran an incredibly nasty negative campaign against Ferrer, with some of his supporters going off the reservation (but only barely off the party line) to trash Sharpton.
Green barely squeeked through to victory in the runoff, but left the latino and black community bitter.
On election day, leaders supporting Ferrer sat on their hands, and large parts of the Democratic base either stayed home (especially black voters) or defected to Bloomberg (half the latino voters).
Green blew it. Pretty much end of story. Ferrer supporters who sat home, especially the union leadership, may come to regret their decision not to hold their nose and turnout for Green, but the fault is overwhelmingly with Green. He has great politics but he was arrogant as hell and paid for it.
-- Nathan Newman
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris Kromm" <ckromm at mindspring.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 9:31 AM Subject: Weigh-in on NY mayor elections?
Hey New Yorkers -- want to give us a little LBO spin on what happened in mayor's race Tuesday?