By Frederic Pierce and John Mariani
Staff writers
They might have backed different candidates in Tuesday's mayoral race in Syracuse, but leaders of Onondaga County's Democratic and Republican parties agree on at least one aspect of the outcome:
It was Destiny.
Republican supporters of Joanie Mahoney say she narrowly lost to Matt Driscoll because the Democrats succeeded in unfairly labeling her as a pawn of Destiny USA developer Bob Congel. The Democrats' efforts slowed her momentum as the campaign barreled into its final week, GOP strategists said.
Democrats who supported Driscoll, meanwhile, say it was Congel and Mahoney who pushed the campaign away from issues such as schools and crime.
By flooding television screens with ads touting the proposed high-tech resort, and flooding Mahoney's campaign fund with at least $60,000, Destiny officials inadvertently galvanized many wavering Driscoll supporters, Democratic Committee Chairman Robert Romeo said. They responded to a massive get-out-the vote effort that sealed his victory.
"I think everyone was concerned that there was a concerted effort by Destiny officials to elect one candidate and get favorable treatment," Romeo said. "People weren't comfortable with that."
There were other factors that influenced the 49.4 percent to 45.8 percent vote outcome, Romeo and Onondaga County Republican Chairman Bob Smith said.
They included inner-party squabbles, party enrollment, help from big-name politicians, newspaper editorials, labor and minority support, and charges and countercharges about whether Driscoll and Mahoney were telling the truth.
Those issues - combined with the constant presence of Destiny - helped create a roller coaster that took Mahoney's campaign from stumbling obscurity to the tightest Syracuse mayoral race in 80 years.
Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1 in Syracuse, making any challenge to a Democratic incumbent an uphill run. Mahoney's campaign started on a particularly steep stretch.
She beganher campaign in the spring, as Republican polls showed her running about 40 percentage points behind Driscoll, said Travis Glazier, Mahoney's campaign coordinator. By July, she still hadn't raised $1,000, the minimum requiring a disclosure filing.
At the time, Democratic polls were showing that schools, crime and neighborhood issues ranked at the top of voters' priorities, while Destiny and economic development ranked much lower, Romeo said.
Mahoney's Republican poll numbers crept up after she began holding weekly news conferences, and donations began trickling in for television spots, said Jack Cookfair, Mahoney's campaign adviser.
The dynamics changed late in the summer when Destiny began running television ads touting the still-unbuilt, still-undesigned Destiny USA resort, Romeo said.
"What crystallized everything was when hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in Destiny ads starting hitting," Romeo said. "The woman and her kid. Osama bin Laden. Then there were all his $60,000-a-year-people saying, 'I just got a job at Destiny. Please Mr. Mayor , let us build Destiny.' "
Suddenly, Romeo said, an issue that had looked to be below voters' radar screens, seemed important, and there was Mahoney, blaming Driscoll for holding it up. Some Democrats began to sense their lock on the mayor's seat was in trouble.
By mid-October, the change became clear. A Post-Standard poll showed Driscoll running 2.1 percentage points ahead of Mahoney, which - given the survey's error margin - meant it was too close to call.
Campaign money went from a trickle to a flood, as Mahoney raised more than $160,000 in three months. Executives, organizations and companies affiliated with Destiny USA donated more than $60,000 by Oct. 8, campaign documents show.
About the same time, The Post-Standard began running a series of editorials criticizing Driscoll and endorsing Mahoney, pushing some undecided voters into her camp, Romeo said.
"We had a lot of powerful forces aligned against us," he said.
Then, during a debate sponsored by WSTM-TV (Channel 3), Mahoney answered a question about whether she'd received donations from Congel or the Pyramid Cos. by saying "no."
That was - technically at least - accurate.
Mahoney neglected, however, to mention all of the money she'd been given by other people and groups affiliated with the multibillion dollar project.
"I think that she tried to run an honorable and upbeat campaign at the beginning," said Erick Mullen, Driscoll's campaign adviser. "I think she was overtaken by forces behind her campaign that turned it decidedly negative."
Driscoll's campaign immediately launched a hard-hitting ad highlighting these contributions and accusing Mahoney of trying to cover them up.
They followed with campaign literature that compared Mahoney's donations to the $777,000 Congel spent in 1985 to pack the Poughkeepsie Town Board with members friendly to a Pyramid mall project.
The effort made an impact on people who were sitting on the fence between the two candidates, said Kate McKenna, president of the Greater Syracuse Labor Council AFL-CIO.
Ann S. Murray, 76, of Circle Road, was one of those fence-sitters.
"I wouldhave voted for Howie Hawkins until Sunday when I realized this whole campaign is about Destiny," said Murray, an enrolled Democrat. "I am now voting for Matt because I think Joanie will just give in to Mr. Congel."
At the same time, a new Post-Standard poll that showed the candidates running in a virtual dead heat galvanized city Democrats, organized labor and minority groups to get out the vote.
They put aside differences because they realized it was important to keep the city out of the hands of Republicans whose interests were perceived as being much less sympathetic to those of labor, McKenna said.
A clearly anti-Driscoll ad sponsored by the Empire State Associated Builders & Contractors brought more union members into Driscoll's massive Election Day get-out-the-vote drive.
"At the end , ABC is a very big anti-union organization," said Joe Rossi, political director of Local 200 United Service Employees International Union. "I think that drew the line in the sand very clearly. If labor needed any more motivation, those ads at the end of the campaign pushed them over the edge. It was obvious who was supporting her. It was obvious who we had to support."
In the end, it was still a nail-biter.
"He did a great job of running against Bob Congel," said Smith, Onondaga County's Republican chairman. "That's who he ran against in the last two to three weeks of this campaign. That's where he started to make a movement and started to gain momentum."
© 2005 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.
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