Labor Seeks Influence in New York’s Mayoral Race
They have so much polling data that they can pinpoint the views of Puerto Ricans and Chinese immigrants alike. They can tailor messages based on brands of toilet paper voters buy. Normally busy handling complaints from teachers, they are now scouring financial records and questioning candidates about $4,000 restaurant bills.
And on Wednesday, the union will throw its sophisticated political machine behind a candidate for mayor of New York City.
Unions across the city, after years of low morale and stalled contract negotiations, are roaring back to life this election season, excited by the prospect of installing a friend of labor in City Hall when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office at the end of the year.
Some groups, like the teachers’ union, are expected to spend several million dollars on the race. Several labor leaders are weighing advertising blitzes aimed at the broader public. Political organizers are training callers, social media activists and door-to-door canvassers.
“Politics in the city are shifting,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the teachers’ union, said. “It’s not a pipe dream. We’re going to be a force.”
Labor leaders face several challenges as they seek to reassert themselves as political heavyweights in a city that has not elected a Democrat for mayor since 1989. In a crowded field, they are split over whom to endorse, causing concern that they might cancel one another out.
At a time of declining union membership and lingering economic turmoil, the strength of organized labor is unclear. Public officials across the country, including Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent, have cast doubt on their motives, and pushed back against demands from municipal workers for retroactive raises and more generous health benefits. And a new pro-business group in New York is preparing to spend millions on City Council races.
Still, political experts say there is potential for organized labor to sway the mayoral election. Analysts expect only modest turnout — around 650,000 voters, or about one-fifth of registered Democrats — in the Democratic primary in September. A runoff election is widely expected, raising the stakes.
Each of the city’s large unions can be valuable to different candidates. Unions representing lower-paid service workers might be able to deliver black and Latino voters for candidates who will rely more heavily on them, like William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller, and Bill de Blasio, the public advocate. The teachers’ union, whose membership is more middle-class, says it has a database of 171,000 teachers, retirees and their relatives.
“Unions know their membership and can motivate them,” said Edward F. Ott, a lecturer at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York. “The impact may be reduced and spread across a lot of candidates, but they’ll definitely have an impact.”
Exactly how much the unions will spend in the mayoral race depends on several factors, including whether they face competition from other unions or from political action groups seeking to dampen the influence of organized labor.
“It could be the wild, wild West,” said Neal Kwatra, a Democratic strategist whose clients include unions, “or it could be business as usual.”
The teachers’ union endorsement is considered a prize because of its politically engaged work force, a treasury of at least $2.5 million and a team that has refined its political operations after years of bitter feuds with Mr. Bloomberg.
The seven leading Democratic candidates for mayor are mostly in line with the union’s ideology, backing its calls to reduce testing and offer more support to failing schools. In recent days, some have stepped up their efforts to court the union’s leaders.
Mr. Thompson, a former president of the city’s Board of Education, recently announced a plan to give each teacher a $200 budget for classroom supplies. On Tuesday, he picked up the support of the principals’ union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators.
Mr. de Blasio, another leading candidate for the teachers’ union’s endorsement, stood with Mr. Mulgrew last week to denounce high-stakes testing.
The union last made an endorsement for mayor in 2001, when it selected Mark Green, a Democrat, over Mr. Bloomberg, then a Republican. It did not enter the contests in 2005 and 2009, wary of Mr. Bloomberg’s vast financial resources. Some union officials regretted the decision to skip the 2009 race, after Mr. Thompson, then the Democratic nominee, came within striking distance of Mr. Bloomberg, who spent more than $100 million of his fortune on that race alone.
When Mr. Mulgrew became the union’s president in 2009, he set out to modernize its political operations. In the past, he said, candidates were chosen based on personal relationships. Now union officials look to polls and focus groups, tossing around terms like “burn rates” and “propensity models.”
The union has become adroit in scrutinizing public spending records to gauge which candidates are more efficient stewards of campaign money. It can examine, for instance, how much a candidate earns at a fund-raiser relative to how much he or she spends on catering, entertainment and facilities.
With a trove of data on the table, conversations between the candidates and Mr. Mulgrew have turned into cross-examinations. He has set benchmarks for each of them, asking them to prove they could build support among crucial demographic groups, like Hispanic voters in Upper Manhattan.
“It’s all about a path to victory,” he said.
On Wednesday, Mr. Mulgrew will recommend a candidate to union delegates, who are expected to approve the choice that day. He is said to be focusing on two candidates — Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Thompson — though he has also expressed admiration for Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker. He faces pressure from Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, the city’s largest union, which has lobbied him to create a broad labor coalition by following its lead and endorsing Mr. de Blasio. Another influential union, District Council 37, has endorsed John C. Liu, the city comptroller.
A central part of the union’s strategy for this election is to use tools more common in national campaigns. It has put together a database of its members, and bought access to information like the purchasing history of people who use chain-store rewards cards. For example, the union might focus calls and mailings on people who buy top-shelf brands of toilet paper or other products, which typically suggest that a person has a higher income and is more likely to vote. It could also use the information to tailor advertisements to certain groups of voters, like placing a container of Cherry Garcia in an ad directed at people who buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
This year, public sector unions are bolstering their political operations after several years of failed negotiations. More than 282,000 unionized workers are without a contract, representing 95 percent of the city’s work force. Workers are seeking as much as $7.8 billion in retroactive raises for the time they have been without a contract. Mr. Bloomberg has said the city does not have the money.
In response, union leaders representing those workers are letting the clock tick as they build political support. Several unions joined together to produce a $200,000 advertising campaign recently. A radio ad said in part: “The people who keep this city running: hard-working, middle-class New Yorkers. They count. They vote.”
Harry Nespoli, leader of a committee of unions representing municipal workers, said they wanted a mayor who would work with unions to find savings in the city budget to pay for wage increases.
“We don’t expect the new mayor to give away the store,” he said. “We expect the new mayor to recognize the fact that we are the city and that we should have negotiations in good faith.”
Even if the city’s labor leaders do not coalesce around one candidate, Mr. Nespoli said, they are united in their frustration with Mr. Bloomberg, who on Monday compared the endorsement of the teachers’ union to the “kiss of death.”
Union officials now have their own retort. They have taken to repeating three numbers, 12-31-13, a reference to the mayor’s final day in office.