Calculating Democratics

The biggest mistake that reporters and others following the Democratic race for New York mayor this year make is that they have missed the historical change in the Democratic primary electorate. And the biggest, if unavoidable, mistake that the pollsters make is that their polls don't differentiate between the one-quarter of Democrats who are going to vote in this primary, and the three-quarters of them who won't.

Psychologically, reporters think it is 1973, the last year in which the incumbent mayor was not seeking reelection. In that year, in the first mayoral primary runoff, Herman Badillo faced off against Abe Beame, and was crushed in the largest turnout ever for a Democratic primary, as more than a million white voters flocked to the polls to defeat the Puerto Rican.

But in those days, three-quarters of the Democratic primary electorate was white. This year, predicts Jerry Skurnik, whose Prime New York consulting firm is the main source for candidates of "prime voter lists," the white percentage of the vote won't be much over 50 percent. There have been two million registered Democrats in the city for all of the last 40 years-the decline of a million in the city's voter lists has taken place entirely among independents and Republicans. In the three Democratic mayoral primaries of the 60s, 25 percent of them, or 750,000, voted each time. Turnout broke a million only in the racially charged primaries of 1973 and 1989 (Dinkins versus Koch).

In the last decade, Democratic turnout has been lower. The highest figure reached in the city was 656,000, in the four-way Senate primary between Robert Abrams, Geraldine Ferraro, Elizabeth Holtzman and Al Sharpton. In the 1997 mayoral primary between Sharpton, Ruth Messinger and Sal Albanese, and in the three-way Senate primary of 1998 between Ferraro, Chuck Schumer and Mark Green, the turnout didn't even reach half a million.

Most of the candidates this year expect the first-primary turnout to be about three-quarters of a million. That means that it would take about 300,000 votes, one-tenth of the Democrats in the city, to win that primary without a runoff.

Much of the discussion of the election has centered on the "undecided" voters, with the implication that those "undecided" voters will switch one way or the other and decide the election. In fact, those undecided voters aren't going to decide, because they aren't going to vote. Even many of the "decided" voters won't vote.

So who will vote? There's a simple way of looking at the Democratic primary electorate: as consisting largely of five different "ethnic groups," and numerous smaller ones (Asians, Arabs and so on). The big five, in descending order of their likely voting strength in this primary, are blacks, liberals, Hispanics, Jews and Catholics. One might protest that "liberals" aren't an "ethnic group," but in New York they are-they live in their own neighborhoods, have their own diets, their own customs and their own religious rites.

Looking down this list of five groups one sees that all but the largest group have a mayoral candidate of their own: Mark Green for liberals, Fernando Ferrer for Hispanics, Alan Hevesi for Jews and Peter Vallone for Catholics. The polls have tended to rank the candidates in just that order. The biggest problem Alan Hevesi and Peter Vallone have is their weakness among blacks-that's why they have tended to run in the two last positions. Green's strength among blacks is what has kept him in first place in every poll.

Reporters, working off an old mental image of the city electorate, think that the Democratic primary is likely to be won by a "moderate," but looking at the big five groups and listing them from left to right-blacks, Hispanics, liberals, Jews, Catholics-it is white liberals who are the "center vote" in the Democratic primary. Now it's true that white liberals aren't as liberal as they used to be-a good proportion of them voted for Giuliani-but in 1973 it was outer-borough Jews who were at the "center" of the Democratic primary electorate. It was their votes that elected Beame in 1973 and Ed Koch in 1977. Koch lost to Dinkins in 1989 because the Catholic Democrats didn't come out for him-he got only 61 percent of their vote, and many of them stayed home waiting to vote for Giuliani in the fall.

This year, the Hispanic vote, always the smallest in the past, is expected to rise to third place at least. The Democrats who like Giuliani the best, heavily Italian-American and outer-borough Jewish, will vote for one of the two Queens candidates or stay at home. It's this new Democratic primary electorate that explains why Alan Hevesi, who a few years ago was proclaiming his hostility to Sharpton, is now endorsing the concept of "reparations" for blacks. Blacks no longer have their own mayor, but they have the single largest voice in determining who the next mayor will be. That's the new Democratic math.