@Rod:

You even mentioning that someone is butt-hurt because they “lost” is a huge sign of what’s wrong. Too many think politics is some kind of team sport where all they want to see is the other side lose, an opposing player hurt, or a wreck. In politics, as sports, you have an overwhelming number of people who do not or barely understand what is going on that participate, unfortunately. These uninformed people choose sides, cheer for their team or issue, and in the end forget there are actual lives at stake. The issue of gay marriage, abortion, alcohol, guns, marijuana, stem-cell research and a host of personal non-issues have been dumbed down to this.

http://www.filmmetro.com/events/view/6266.

you do need to register for a free account, but it’s not too much of a hassle.

If we take a look at the polls, it doesn’t seem like Bloomberg did better than expected (he was hovering around the 50-53% mark in almost every recent poll.) However, Thompson did do better, but I don’t think motivation had anything to do with it. If we take a look at these polls, it seems that Thompson’s final numbers were really close to the sum of what he got in the polls plus the undecided voters.

Unfortunately, the New York Times exit polls don’t ask the question (when did you make up your mind about who you were going to vote for) so we can’t actually tell if this is what occurred. However, most voters who decide who to vote for late are the least informed voters. And, usually, they decide based on a relatively salient issue – in this case, it could Term Limits, the Economy, or how much Mayor Bloomberg spent.

While I would normally lean towards thinking the economy was the salient issue among undecided voters in this race (considering the financial crisis and what we know about economic voting), I do not believe that is the case here. Those who said the economy was the issue that mattered most when deciding their vote went for Bloomberg 56 to 41%. First, this doesn’t support my thesis and, secondly, I think term limits are an easier issue for uninformed voters to grasp and vote on (and we know that about 70% of NYC voters disapprove of term limits.)

Of the 45% of voters who said term limits made them less likely to vote for Mr. Bloomberg, 76% went for Thompson, which makes sense. Let’s say that all undecided voters didn’t support term limits (because I would think that the few people that do support them knew they were voting for Bloomberg). In Quinnipiac’s last poll, 10% were undecided. If 80% went to Thompson that would give him 8% of the undecided vote plus his original 38% vote share, giving him a total of 46% – pretty close to what he got. This seems to confirm that fact that undecided voters went for Thompson as a result of term limits, which is why the polls underperformed for Thompson but were pretty accurate in predicting Bloomberg’s vote share.

If undecided voters were unhappy over the extension of term limits yet approved of the job Mayor Bloomberg is doing (which it seems like they were) then maybe these voters went to Thompson to send a signal about their displeasure with term limits to Bloomberg knowing that he would win (because polls put him so far ahead.) They got their cake and can eat it too.

As to the question of whether this will have an impact on Bloomberg’s ability to govern, probably not. He still has very high approval ratings and is likely to maintain high approval ratings. In the short run, it may hurt him a little, but in the long run its about what voters think about him – they have liked what he has done and will probably like what he does in the future. Plus, as long as Christine Quinn remains Speaker (pretty likely), he’ll have control of the City Council as well.