Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

If there’s one person who can unite this nation, it’s New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who likes to prattle on about his transcendent, historic vision and who (polls confirm) roughly nobody wants running for president after he’s flirted with the idea for months, but who The New York Daily News reported Friday will announce as soon as next week that he’s joining the absurdly crowded Democratic field—where he’d be the only one of 23 declared candidates with a negative favorability rating.

I was tempted to propose a New York to America: Take our mayor, please, joke, but 76 percent of New Yorkers say he shouldn’t run. Politico New York surveyed 30-odd members of Team de Blasio, and all but two said it was a bad idea, with one calling it “fucking insane.”

The mayor is the consummate special-interest politician; his latest pay-to-play scandal is for the city to pay an above-market price for a portfolio of homeless hotels owned by a family with a key donor connection to the mayor. In a hypothetical debate with the current president – extremely hypothetical at this point, to be sure – de Blasio would have no moral authority to take on Trump’s own shady real estate practices.

De Blasio, despite his rhetoric, has never been a good radical; he’s too beholden to the local fundraising machine. But he’s also not a good technocrat: key initiatives to turn around underperforming high schools and help people with mental illnesses have failed, with the mayor barely noticing. It’s not clear which path, ultimately, Democratic primary voters will choose, but they would seem to want one of these two choices – and the mayor fits neither bill.

As de Blasio weighs entering the 2020 race, the prospect of a President de Blasio has been met with widespread derision. The New Republic’s Alex Shephard termed his interest in the presidency an “embarrassing quest for national fame,” while the mayor’s own allies (anonymously) told Politico that his flirtation with a presidential run was “fucking insane.” De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, has said the “timing is not exactly right” for him to launch a campaign. The New York Times, which seems to take gleeful pleasure in dinging de Blasio for everything from calling errant snow days to ostentatiously hanging around Iowa, recently noted that Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has generated far more presidential buzz than the mayor of the country’s biggest city. Even in his hometown, there seems to be only one person who thinks a de Blasio presidential campaign would be anything other than a joke: de Blasio himself.

The human ego is a powerful beast that grows luxuriant in the soul of career politicians. We are seeing an egregious example in the proto-presidential campaign of New York mayor Bill de Blasio, who, according to the New York Times, is bulling ahead toward a formal candidacy despite multiple indicators that it’s a very bad idea….

There have been so signs of any craving for a de Blasio candidacy on the trail so far. His first two recent trips to Iowa have been, in a word, fiascoes (his first, last December, was marked by NYPD protests, and during the second, in February, he was stranded in a blizzard at a Super 8 motel and dined on a gas-station burrito). He hasn’t been listed in most 2020 polls, and his peak performance in any has been a booming one percent.

It’s hard to discern any path to the White House for Hizzoner. Let’s say he can revive his sagging reputation as a fighting progressive. Is he really going to challenge Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris in that “lane”? None of the early states would strike you as de Blasio Country, unless New York chooses to have a relatively early primary next year (it was in April in 2016, and the legislature has yet to set a 2020 date). But then again, it’s not like New York is a hotbed of BDB ’20 enthusiasm. Au contraire, as the Daily News noted after a new Quinnipiac poll of his constituents was released this very week:

A whopping 76% of New Yorkers polled said de Blasio should not run for president — with just 18% supporting a bid. The feeling was as universal among New Yorkers as their contempt for bagels sliced like bread — every single party, gender, racial group, borough and age group polled agreed Hizzoner should not run.

Those polled didn’t just think the potential run was a bad idea — they thought it would be bad for New York City, by a margin of 47% to 32%, the poll found.

The specter of President Bill de Blasio has attracted ridicule, from his would-be constituents and from the media—back in January, for example, the NY Times cuttingly said, of BdB’s theoretical run, that he “remains an afterthought” in the deepening pool of Democratic candidates, “if he is thought of at all.”

Yet none of that has deterred our mayor from coyly glad-handing, a practice that does not sit well with New Yorkers. In a Quinnipiac University poll published Thursday, New York City residents surveyed gave him the lowest score of all the Democratic hopefuls: 48 percent have an unfavorable opinion of de Blasio. And de Blasio’s statewide favorability rating is at an all-time low since taking office in 2014, according to Mary Snow, polling analyst for the Quinnipiac University Poll.

New Yorkers think a congresswoman who isn’t even eligible for the White House would be a better president than Mayor Bill de Blasio, a new poll suggests. Just 5 percent of Empire State voters picked the Democratic mayor when asked who among New York’s political stars would make the best president, according to the Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.

That’s the lowest share among the five names included in the poll. Even U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez — who at 29 isn’t even old enough to be president — did better, with 7 percent of voters saying she would be the best fit.