> > A problem with your model, Nathan, is that Bloomberg was a Democrat
> > who ran as a Repub because he couldn't get on the Dem ballot.
>
> But he only won because of a meltdown in the Democrats in the
> Ferrer-Green contest combined with the craziness post-911. He would
> have had a far easier time if he hadn't had to declare himself a
> Republican, but could have run in a nonpartisan election.
Do really think so? I think the only reason he got anywhere was because he was able to game the existing partisan system. He was able to buy the Republican nomination precisely because so few people voted in it (and those who did were tickled with the idea of their side winning) and that got him in the runoff. I think if we had the system he is currently proposing in 2001, Bloomberg never would have won. The runoff would have been between Green and Ferrer. The amount of votes Bloomberg won in the Republican primary would have put him in last place in the Democratic primary.
Just to be clear, I'm voting against this proposal. I think there's at least a half a dozen good reasons to vote against it, and no good reason to vote for it. But I'm a bit put off by claims that we are certain what would happen in New York if it passed, based on what happened in places that are very different, under systems that are very different, or based on projecting New York results forward or backward under the assumption that a change in voting system would have zero effect on the percentages of vote and turnout. I think the most likely result here would be a morass of unintended and unforeseen side effects as party machinery and financial laws evolved. To enter such a morass based on bad reasoning, devious propaganda and little public discussion seems the height of folly. And above all there is the spectre that we might end up getting something like California's recall vote, which would mean Californians would get to laugh at us, which my amour propre as a New Yorker finds intolerable.
But just for the sake of theoretical argument about a system all of us are agreed in voting against -- at the mayoral level, the current system has given us 12 years of Republican mayors in an overwhelmingly Democratic town. And the last 4 years were bought by a rich guy with zero political experience who spent more than anyone else in history. It seems hard to imagine that a nonpartisan system could possibly have produced a worse run of results. And is also seems perfectly plausible to argue that all of those results would have been different if the currently proposed system had been in force then. But certain it is not. Nothing is certain.
As for the city council, Josh and Nathan speak as if it had some real power. Does it? My impression was that it was almost entirely neutered during the last omnibus charter reform and is now nothing but a symbolic talking shop -- that almost all the real power is in the mayor's office. Or exercised at the state level.
Michael