1. Oh Gawd! Do ya really think it could happen???

2. Maybe. He has the personal wealth and quasi celebrity status likely needed for any serious non-major party presidential candidate. He also holds public office, winning a partisan election.

   The challenge would still be ballot access, debate rules and the fact that he would likely be perceived as a spoiler.

   Also policy wise I am not sure how well his pro-business, social liberarlism would play across the nation….

3. One can only hope it doesn’t play well.

4. No Mayor of New York City has gone on to higher office since the 19th Century.

   Bloomberg spent $100 million to win 51% in one city, I don’t think he has enough money to carry on a national campaign at even a fraction of that level of per capita spending.

5. Another excellent post by Gene Berkman. While the New York City mayoralty has proven to be a political graveyard for more than a century, the same thing isn’t necessarily true for those who ran for mayor and lost.

   Mario Cuomo, of course, was elected lieutenant governor and then served as a three-term governor of New York after losing a close mayoral race to Ed Koch in 1977. It was a particularly nasty campaign with posters appearing around the city emblazoned with the words: “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo.”

   Narrowly defeated in the Democratic primary runoff that year, Cuomo remained in the mayoral contest and polled 597,257 votes on the Liberal Party (and Good Neighborhood) ticket in November, losing to Koch by slightly more than 115,000 votes.

6. While everyone is aware that Mayor John V. Lindsay sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1972, near the end of his second term, some readers might not be aware that several of the minor-party candidates for mayor of New York in the past ninety years or so, also ran for president.

   The mayoral losers were an interesting bunch and added immensely to our nation’s political landscape.

   Socialist Norman M. Thomas, who ran for mayor of New York City in 1925 and 1929 — polling more than 175,000 votes in the latter contest — was obviously the best known of them, heading his party’s presidential ticket in six consecutive presidential campaigns between 1928 and 1948.

   Then there was Eric Hass, longtime editor of The Weekly People, the Socialist Labor Party’s official publication. A prolific writer on gardening and conservation whose articles frequently appeared in the New York Times, the little-remembered Hass ran for mayor of the Big Apple five times between 1941 and 1965.

   A librarian for the Trinity Parish of New York City’s Episcopal Church after leaving the SLP in 1969, Hass had been his party’s candidate for the presidency in 1952, 1956, 1960 and 1964, finishing third in the LBJ-Goldwater debacle of 1964.

   Moreover, Clifton DeBerry, an African-American house painter from Brooklyn who ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, had been the Socialist Workers Party candidate for president a year earlier.

   Apparently eyeing bigger and better things, the energetic and scholarly D. Leigh Colvin, a University of Chicago and Columbia University-educated authority on politics and prohibition and author of an exhaustive 678-page history of the prohibition movement and the party, headed the Prohibition Party’s ticket in 1936, nineteen years after running unsuccessfully for mayor of New York.

7. He could spend $1b if he thought there was a way. As for the 51%, many voters stayed home to show their disappointment with the term limits issue, using the courts to override the peoples’ choice of two terms, but still thought he was the better choice. I was a poll captian and poll monitor for two polls on the Eastside of Manhattan, the 73rd AD, where he got 82%.

8. How about having a Prez get elected with about 35 percent of the popular votes ???

   — and claim a mandate for anything.

   Nonpartisan A.V.

9. I know this is a bit off topic, but another fascinating yet little known aspect of Mario Cuomo’s 1977 mayoral campaign was the creation of the Neighborhood Preservation Party (NPP), a short-lived entity that made it considerably easier for conservative Democrats and independents who supported Cuomo’s angry, populist candidacy that year to vote for him without necessarily pulling the Liberal Party lever.

   All of this, of course, took place before Cuomo — now considered a liberal icon — became nationally known as a result of his riveting keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic national convention in San Francisco.

   Founded by Cuomo, who was widely perceived as a pro-life politician in those days, the Neighborhood Preservation Party appeared in column G on the New York City ballot that year. Acknowledging that his new party was badly positioned — appearing in a column on the far right side of New York’s crowded ballot — Cuomo happily urged his conservative backers to support his new party, jokingly telling them that “if you don’t want to vote Liberal on November 8th, go to the far right.”

   Many of them did.

   The NPP even adopted a platform. In keeping with Cuomo’s relatively conservative candidacy, the party proposed creating a new Deputy Mayor for Neighborhoods and called for the end to blockbusting and redlining — exploitative tactics, according to Cuomo, that were destroying neighborhoods by deliberately altering their racial balance while inducing panic selling by existing homeowners at prices below market value and denying mortgages for the rehabilitation of existing properties.

   The NPP also sharply denounced the city’s practice of “dumping” welfare recipients, methadone addicts and other troubled souls on “stable neighborhoods.” The new party also overtly appealed to the city’s law-and-order crowd, with the conservative-sounding Cuomo promising “more cops, more judges, more people going to jail.”

   The party’s symbol, designed personally by Cuomo, consisted of a drawing of a brownstone with a tree growing in its yard, while his campaign flyers, distributed widely throughout the city’s ethnic, blue-collar neighborhoods, urged New Yorkers to “Vote as if your neighborhood depended on it!”

   Envisioning the Neighborhood Preservation Party as a permanent vehicle for grassroots political expression in New York City and beyond, Cuomo — the party’s only candidate — predicted that his new party would one day “become a viable force in the city and the state.” He also predicted that the fledgling NPP would garner more votes in the mayoral contest than the Republican and Conservative parties, the latter of which enjoyed the third spot on the ballot.

   While the overwhelming majority of Cuomo’s nearly 588,000 votes that autumn were cast on the Liberal line, the Neighborhood Preservation Party nevertheless added 64,971 votes to his total — more than the total number of votes cast for hapless Republican nominee Roy Goodman. It was also 7,500 more than the 57,000 votes garnered by longtime radio talk-show host Barry Farber, the Conservative Party’s nominee.

   Remarkably, a large share of Cuomo’s support came from voters who ordinarily might have supported the Republican or Conservative candidate for mayor.

   It seems that the 46-year-old Cuomo, who was then serving as New York’s Secretary of State — an appointed position — had some serious third-party blood pumping through his veins during this period.

   In fact, he briefly considered running for statewide office on the Neighborhood Preservation ticket in 1978, possibly in a fusion effort with Ray Harding and the Liberals who were more than anxious to demonstrate that they weren’t completely beholden to the state’s Democratic organization.

   Cuomo’s long-forgotten minor-party creation, however, quickly faded from the scene when he agreed to serve as Gov. Hugh Carey’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in June of that year.

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