Tastes Great, Less Filling: More Choices, More Democracy, With Significantly Fewer Voters!

Since the beginning, the mayor and his editorial board lackeys argued that allowing the mayor to buy a third term constituted “more choices” or “more democracy”. Apparently that won’t also translate to more voters:

And a number of political analysts say that a predicted record-low turnout next Tuesday may jeopardize Mr. Bloomberg’s projected double-digit victory margin and even deliver him a third term with the lowest total vote received by a New York City mayor in nearly a century.

. . .

Mr. Bloomberg won in 2001 with 744,000 votes. He won a second term four years later with 753,000 of the 1.3 million cast. If as few as 20 percent of eligible voters turn out and Mr. Bloomberg wins even by a 10-percentage-point landslide, he would be re-elected with fewer than 500,000 votes — the lowest total since John F. Hylan’s in 1917.

That, by the way, was before women were allowed to vote and when the city’s population was smaller by nearly three million.

Which is all funny, in a ha-ha funny kind of way, as Clyde Haberman reports:

Buoyed by the polls and his own astonishing campaign spending, Mr. Bloomberg seems confident that four more years at City Hall are in the bag for him. Monday morning, he spoke about the New York that he envisioned in 2013, when his third term would end. This was in a speech to students attending New York University’s Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service.

He was pleased, he told them, to speak at a school named for “a distinguished three-term mayor.”

That produced thin laughter. Maybe the students had the Monday morning blahs. Or maybe they simply didn’t think it was funny.

“I thought I’d get a better laugh than that,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “It’s not easy to do three-term jokes, folks.”

There’s a reason for that.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.