Candidates for the Office of New York City Mayor, incumbent Michael Bloomberg., left, and challenger, Democratic Mayoral candidate William Thompson, shake hands after their televised debate in New York, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009.
Mayor Bloomberg Tuesday night won the third term he once vowed never to pursue - though he did it by a surprisingly thin margin while outspending his rival by nearly $80 million.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg won a third term as New York mayor Tuesday in a closer-than-expected race against a Democratic challenger who stoked voter resentment over the way Bloomberg changed the city's term-limits law so he could stay in office.
With all precincts reporting, Bloomberg, the richest man in New York and founder of the financial information company Bloomberg LP, defeated William Thompson Jr. 51 percent to 46 percent.
The mayor called it a "hard-fought victory in a very difficult year," and promised that New Yorkers "ain't seen nothing yet" from him.
"I'm committed to working twice as hard in the next four years as I did in the past eight," Bloomberg said.
In the days leading up to the election, polls showed Bloomberg with as much as an 18-point lead, an edge so big that critics accused the mayor of overkill in his strategy of bombarding the city with campaign ads.
His actual margin of victory was far smaller than the nearly 20-point blowout he pulled off in 2005.
When all the bills are paid, Bloomberg will probably have spent more than $100 million on his campaign, the most expensive self-financed campaign in U.S. history. Thompson, the city's comptroller, relied on donations and matching funds for his mayoral bid, and was on track to spend about a tenth of Bloomberg's staggering total.
"This campaign was about defying conventional wisdom ... this campaign was about standing strong, standing tall and never backing down in the face of a formidable challenge," Thompson said after conceding defeat.
Thompson ran up huge margins in black and Hispanic neighborhoods, winning by a 3-to-1 margin in some districts.
He beat Bloomberg handily in predominantly black neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens. He won Harlem and East Harlem easily, along with other heavily Hispanic districts in upper Manhattan and the Bronx.
By contrast, Bloomberg won easily on Staten Island, which has a much larger white population. He also fared better in Manhattan, particularly on the Upper East Side, where he lives.
The tiny margin could weaken his power and make his third term more difficult at City Hall, where Democrats poised to sweep into citywide offices indicated they would not shy away from disagreeing with the mayor.
"You'll see a lot of strong voices as checks and balances," said Democrat Bill de Blasio, who won the job of City Hall ombudsman Tuesday. "It will be a very different experience than what he experienced the last eight years."
Bloomberg is just the fourth mayor to win a third term, after Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Wagner and Ed Koch.
Bloomberg was a Republican but left the party in 2007 to explore a presidential bid, a dream he eventually abandoned. For his third mayoral run, he ran again on the GOP and Independence Party lines.
While Bloomberg was often described as having every advantage in the race, including his estimated $17.5 billion fortune and consistently high approval ratings, his campaign did have to overcome some obstacles.
The mayor, who has close ties to Wall Street and development, was running for re-election at a time when finance and real estate were falling apart and those relationships were not necessarily seen as positives.
There are also the numbers — New York City leans heavily to the left, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans by a ratio of 5-to-1. Democrats were also energized by their party's White House win in 2008.
And New Yorkers were angry that Bloomberg reversed his long-held support for term limits last year and persuaded the City Council, in a matter of weeks, to extend the law so he could run for a third term.
Thompson sought to stoke that resentment, but it was not enough. He did not make a strong, separate case for why he should be elected.
Many Thompson supporters said Tuesday that term limits was the single reason why they voted for him.
Jason Gerald supported Bloomberg in 2005 but voted for the Democrat this year.
"I didn't like the way he overturned term limits," said Gerald, a retired police officer. "He thinks he's the only person who can lead this city."
When Bloomberg announced last year his intention to change the law and run again, he said it was because the city needed his financial expertise to get through the economic meltdown.
He never revived that argument during the race, though, which grew increasingly negative as Election Day drew near and polls showed most voters still did not know much about Thompson.
The Bloomberg campaign saw its opportunity — it defined Thompson through negative ads and attacks before the Democrat could do it himself.
He will likely have spent more than $50 million on advertising alone, and millions more on his huge army of staffers, some of them the top strategists and consultants plucked from presidential-level campaigns.
The mayor was able to target each voter with unique messages using a database managed by Ken Strasma, who was President Barack Obama's national targeting director in 2008.
The data was crucial not only in shaping the campaign's messages, but also for Election Day operations as the campaign tracked voter turnout in every election district.
For example, campaign officials noticed lower turnout in some areas of the Bronx and Queens than the data had predicted, so the campaign changed its operations on the ground.
Field workers were rerouted to different areas in Queens to knock on doors and get voters to the polls, and Koch was summoned to record a last-minute robocall that began calling Bronx voters around 5 p.m.
Mayor Bloomberg Tuesday night won the third term he once vowed never to pursue - though he did it by a surprisingly thin margin while outspending his rival by nearly $80 million.
With 94% of the vote counted, Bloomberg was ahead of Controller William Thompson by some 40,000 votes - the tightest margin of victory in recent memory.
It was enough to give Bloomberg a 50.4% to 46.3% lead, much tighter than most polls had predicted, and shocking New Yorkers who long assumed the mayor would easily roll to re-election.
"That's hardly a mandate," one of Bloomberg's top campaign advisors said at the Sheraton in midtown, where staffers who have staked their careers on the mayor's third term stared glumly at their BlackBerries.
Chief Bloomberg spokesman Howard Wolfson said the narrow margin, "doesn't matter."
Bloomberg, 67, had long said he respected the city's two-term limit on holding office, but changed his mind last year and convinced the City Council to extend it so he could run again.
Thompson, 56, stayed in the race after Bloomberg declared his intention to run again, while most other challengers dropped out.
That left him as the only vessel in which New Yorkers could place their sour feelings about the move, as well as eight years' worth of accumulated grievances about taxes, parking tickets, bike lanes and other mayoral initiatives.
In Riverdale in the Bronx, one couple found themselves split on whether Bloomberg overstepped by going for a third term and ending up splitting their vote.
Retired doctor Emanuel Phillips, 75, said he soured on Bloomberg because of term limits - while his wife, Iris Phillips, 70, a retired physician's assistant, said "Bloomberg has done a good job so I don't mind him staying on."
"The citizens of this city voted for that limitation," Emanuel Phillips said. "And I'm just resentful of all the electioneering. ... Three messages on the phone yesterday. Who needs that?"
Meanwhile, over in Co-Op City in Baychester, there was no mistaking the anger with Bloomberg over term limits.
"I wanted a change. Bloomberg did a good job but I didn't agree with his third term. He's trying to let his money do the talking," said Francois Molin, 70, a retired lab technician.
While many New Yorkers may have assumed the billionaire Bloomberg was a shoo-in to win a third term, the leaders of both campaigns said they knew from the start the mayor was vulnerable - which is why he opened his wallet so wide.
Voters around the country had soured on politicians during an economic crisis that produced rising unemployment, and Thompson tried to use rising taxes and water bills into a populist cry to unseat the mayor.
"There was an anti-incumbency mood in the country, a tough economy," said Bloomberg's campaign manager, Bradley Tusk.
"It meant running a very, despite the mayor's approval rating, running a very aggressive campaign from Day One."
Bloomberg spent at least $85.2 million on a comprehensive voter targeting effort, top-notch veteran operatives, and waves of TV ads and mailers that portrayed Bloomberg as a strong and effective leader long before Thompson could make his case.
Tusk said Bloomberg spent the money because he needed to.
"People believed Mike Bloomberg was an extremely good mayor before we started the campaign," Tusk said. "Our view was take nothing for granted and use the resources that we had. And we did."
The mayor ran his first TV ads and knocked on his first doors in April, and was prepared to attack Thompson's record as controller and Board of Education president before he had even won the Democratic primary.
"I was surprised at how early they went up negative," said Thompson's campaign manager, Eduardo Castell. "They knew that this was going to be closer than people expected."
Thompson spent just over $6.6 million by the end of the race, making it harder to sell himself as an acceptable alternative to voters who may have liked Bloomberg's record but were uneasy with the term limits hange.
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