alienating any constituencies he would need in the general election, as Green had done. Whatever the
merits of this strategy, a late surge by Anthony Weiner plus the presence of a black candidate drained
votes from Ferrer that he had been able to attract in the 2001 runoff. As Table 2 shows, he led the low
turnout primary with a bare 39 percent of the vote. After thinking overnight about making a race of it, the
second place candidate, Anthony Weiner, withdrew and proclaimed that Ferrer had the 40 percent of the
vote necessary to preclude a runoff.
As in LA, the Latino candidate thus emerged as the challenger from a racially divided field.
Unlike Villaraigosa’s success in LA, however, Ferrer was unable to bring together the elements of a
challenging coalition between the primary and the general election. The odds may well have been
stacked against him, as Mayor Bloomberg increasingly consolidated support among white Democrats,
African Americans, and immigrant constituencies as well as his (small) core of white Republicans. But
Ferrer made one move that had a lingering adverse impact on his campaign. It was probably one of the
few things that might shape the election over which he had control. In March, Ferrer had remarked to a
meeting of the police sergeants union that he did not think the police shooting of Amadou Diallo was a
crime and that it had been over-indicted. This produced a furor, with many African American leaders
criticizing his words (Cardwell and Hicks with Archibold 2005). Although many in the black establishment
ultimately endorsed Ferrer, some did not and the remark clearly had a negative impact on his standing in
black public opinion. In the primary, black support for Virginia Fields over eroded Ferrer’s position
compared to the 2001 runoff election (a decline of 26 percentage points). Despite receiving many
endorsements from the black political establishment, he was never able to create the same degree of
mass support he had in 2001.
The general election became a blow-out of historic proportions for Mayor Bloomberg. He won
58.4 percent of the 1.3 million ballots cast (again, a relatively low turnout), having spent a new campaign
spending record of $84 million, or almost $112 for every vote he received. Though no traditional exit poll
was mounted, it appears that Mayor Bloomberg won almost three-quarters of the white vote, nearly half
the black vote, more than half of the Asian vote, and surprising minority of the vote in Latino areas, many
Convention