Last week, I wrote about Bill de Blasio's victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York, and mentioned that exit polls showed that his support was "consistently high among all income groups."
But the top income category in the exit poll, conducted by Edison Research, was made up of voters in households that earn $100,000 or more, which is too blunt a measure for a city with at least 389,100 millionaires, 2,929 multimillionaires and 70 billionaires.
Howard Rosenthal, a political scientist at NYU, wrote to me pointing out that the Times's own detailed map of precinct results shows a more complex and interesting pattern.
"Just looking at voters over $100K misses something. $100K is zilch in Manhattan," Rosenthal observed. Christine Quinn, the city council president, "basically carried all the precincts bordering Central Park East, South, and West" – some of the richest precincts in the city.
It turns out that Rosenthal's point is well taken. Democratic politics in New York City — a cauldron of self-destructive ethnic and gender conflicts for the past 20 years — may be on the cutting edge of a post-racial politics.
The Times compiled a set of data more detailed than that provided by the exit polls, data that showed both actual precinct results and household income levels. The first map using this data, Figure 1, shows Manhattan winners by precinct or election district with de Blasio in blue and Quinn in beige. Quinn's success in precincts on three sides of Central Park is striking.
The second map, Figure 2, focuses on central Manhattan election districts with median annual household incomes of more than $215,000. Quinn beat de Blasio in these districts – the most affluent in the city, many of them clustered on the Upper East Side.
The pattern is fixed. If you look at the outcome in other distinct areas – upscale Manhattan Assembly Districts – you see the same pattern of precinct-level voting. Quinn decisively carried the 73rd Assembly District, one of Manhattan's most affluent East Side neighborhoods, 6,031 to de Blasio's 4,360 and to William C. Thompson Jr.'s 3,513.
Quinn came in a very close second in the 67th Assembly District, which covers a good chunk of the Upper West Side — 8,472 votes, 35 short of de Blasio's 8,507.
While there are clear dangers in over-interpreting primary results — turnout in September was a dismal 691,801, just 22 percent of registered Democrats — the Democratic primary electorate, small as it was, determined who would wield executive power for the next four years.
I asked Howard Graubard, a political blogger who writes under the name Gatemouth, for his take on the election, and he emailed back, "it is safe to say that Quinn's base was among the highest income voters." This was apparent not only in Manhattan, but in affluent sections of other boroughs, including "coastal brownstone Brooklyn, Park Slope and Forest Hills."
One of the most interesting conclusions that can be drawn from the primary results was that class trumped race, gender and sexual identity, all factors that have played strong roles in recent Democratic contests.
"Any racial vote for Thompson simply disappeared," NYU's Rosenthal noted. "Gender and sexual orientation were of at best marginal benefit to Quinn. So I think the election was largely about redistribution," Rosenthal said.
Rosenthal suggested that the differences in voting based on income point to internal party conflicts between what could be called the investment banker wing of the party and its less affluent counterpart, what Rosenthal calls "the tension between Steve Rattner and Citigroup (Robert Rubin, Peter Orszag, Jack Lew) Democrats and the mass of voters." The outcome, in Rosenthal's view, was "a repudiation of the money wing of the Democratic party."
Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton who wrote the book "Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches" with Rosenthal and Keith Poole of the University of Georgia, said that their research has shown that:
"there are big regional differences in party support related to social issues, culture etc., but within regions, voting is very much determined by income. So the primary is a pretty good illustration, in that even within a very liberal primary the results break down by income."
In a roundabout fashion, the Rev. Al Sharpton, a fixture in the politics of race, made the same point in the immediate aftermath of the primary:
"What the election showed the other night is a lot of the identity politics of 20 years ago, 30 years ago has now become identity politics of policy."
Interested in exploring the startling notion that New York City Democratic politics would become a mainspring of post-racial, post-gender politics, I sought out Seth Barron, an acute observer of the intricacies of city politics, who blogs at CityCouncilWatch.
"Quinn's stronghold was the silk stocking district," Barron wrote:
"From the beginning Quinn was the candidate of business New York: real estate, finance, media etc. Her fundraising was mostly drawn from the same sectors."
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