Just thought I’d talk a little about my fair city, Rochester, NY, and the mayoral election. You’re gonna love these numbers!
The results of the Rochester mayoral race were not a surprise. Democrats have always had a strong hold in the city. link to results.
But don’t you love these numbers? The Democratic candidate, Robert Duffy, won with 72% of the vote. So that means that his Republican challenger got 28% of the vote? No, try 16%…there were two other candidates in the field.
Problem is, once you leave the city limits, and the diverse population, you get into the vanilla-whitebread suburbs, which are strong Republican. The County Manager is Republican, as was the former.
But it’s nice to walk the streets of my neighborhood and see all of the anti-Bush stickers and flags. Let’s take consolation when we can get it…maybe the Bush nightmare will soon be over!
Kudos to Rochester!
such as crime and defacto segregation; there’s an area that they call “the wedge” where the white folk live, and then the area they call the “crescent”, which is the majority of the city, where the minorities live. That’s a bit simplistic, but basically true.
The mayor, Robert Duffy, though, is white and was the former police chief. He seems to have made a bridge between the minority communities and the white community. The current mayor, who won four straight terms, is black, and very popular. He endorsed Duffy over another black Democratic candidate.
For each open Democrat – there are probably a lot of closet Democrats in the suburbs. The more this administration tanks the more Democrts we should see.
Do you have a local group that reaches out and supports suburban Dems? We are working on the Take Back Red California plan here…predominant Blue areas working with smaller areas with manpower for campaigns. It’s working – slowly – but working.
on your source page.
The two gratest challenges the Mayor will face are:
The first is a traditionally Republican issue and the second similarly Democratic. But for a Democrat former police chief, the Rochester race was a match made in heaven.
In my neck of the woods, the story’s more “traditional.” Miami-Dade County’s mayor is Carlos Alvarez, a Republican and former police chief.
Here’s what the League of Independent Voters had to say about him when he ran in ’04. . .
* former police director running on his record of putting away
corrupt officials * Endorsed by some police unions * opposes
gay marriage * local unions state Alvarez supports privatization
of union jobs * has been criticized for running with limited
issue platform
And some say that the “limited issue platform” (anti-corruption) is exactly what got him elected by the predominantly Cuban-Hispanic Republican electorate. Others say, it was anti-Democrat backlash to Alex Penelas, the fomer fair-haired boy of the Democrats whose mayoral term had expired and who was forever linked to and tarnished by the Elian Gonzalez deportation debacle– an unforgivable crime down here. And by his ill-considered announcement once upon a time that he’d toss his hat in the ring against Bob Graham, Florida’s perenially popular former senator. (That’s when his fair hair fell out.)
Guess Rochester and Miami give evidence to the saw that all politics is local.
due to several incidents in which blacks were shot and killed in the course of arrests or investigations. Duffy was able to hold the community together, though, during these incidents.
We have a high violent crime rate here, and it’s almost exclusively minority-on-minority crime. Hopefully Duffy will be able to do something regarding the economics, and demographics, of the city which lead to these violent crimes.