It's the closest Syracuse mayor's race in 80 years
By Frederic Pierce and John Mariani
Staff writers
Syracuse Mayor Matt Driscoll won a second term Tuesday in the city's tightest mayoral race in 80 years, beating Republican Joanie Mahoney by 3.6 percent of the vote.
Driscoll took 49.4 percent of the vote, while Mahoney took 45.8 percent, according to unofficial results from the Onondaga County Board of Elections. Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins earned 4.6 percent.
"We held together, we closed ranks," Driscoll told a cheering crowd of about 500 supporters in Eastwood's Palace Theater. "We put our heads down and fought against the fortress of opposition, and we won."
The final results, announced before the mayor arrived, were greeted by several minutes of cheers, applause and dancing in the aisles at the Democratic victory party, as Donna Summer's "I Will Survive" boomed from the sound system.
It followed an hour of emotional ups and downs, as election returns projected on the theater movie screen showed Driscoll and Mahoney switching in and out of the lead every few minutes.
Several hundred supporters at the Regency Ballroom of the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel & Conference Center, subdued most of the evening as the returns went against Mahoney, cheered for their candidate when she conceded defeat.
"I entered this race because I know that Syracuse can do better," Mahoney said. "We should expect more from our City Hall. While we came up short at the voting booth today, we did send Matt Driscoll a message. We told City Hall that our opinions really do matter, that we want to be part of the process, and that we expect a city government of the highest of integrity and the purest of intentions."
Mahoney, a former prosecutor and city councilor, was hoping to become the first elected woman mayor of not only Syracuse, but of any of the five major upstate New York cities.
Polls conducted for The Post-Standard and other news media showed the candidates were running in a virtual dead heat coming into Election Day. In the end, the margin of victory was the smallest since the city's mayoral race of 1925, when Republican George Hanna slipped past Democrat John Walrath with a 1.4 percent margin.
Driscoll Tuesday spent several minutes thanking supporters, which included big-name Democratic politicians like Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer; labor unions and minority groups, including the Alliance Network and Women of Color, for helping him make a last-minute push to get out the vote.
Driscoll's forces Tuesday unleashed what Campaign Coordinator Dan Maffei called "an unprecedented effort on the ground."
Between 300 and 350 volunteers walked city streets on the mayor's behalf, knocking on the doors of likely Driscoll voters to ask if they'd gone to the polls and to volunteer to drive them if they hadn't, Maffei said.
Another 150 volunteers telephoned likely supporters.
The Alliance Network contributed 50 volunteers who knocked on doors and dropped literature on the city's Southwest Side, Brighton, the Near Eastside and Salt Springs, said Alliance founder Walter Dixie.
In the end, Democratic candidates ended up doing better than Driscoll. Democratic Council President Bea Gonzalez beat Republican Otis Jennings by more than 5,000 votes to keep her seat. Democratic candidates for councilor-at-large Van Robinson, Stephanie Miner and Kathy Callahan each received more than twice as many votes as their Republican challengers Bill Harper and Kurt Schmeling and Jonathan Shaw.
"We were elected by the people, and we promise to serve them, not the special interests, and that's exactly what we're going to keep doing," Driscoll told the crowd. "This is about our families. It's about people, and they always come first."
The comments were a thinly veiled reference to campaign advertisements financed by Destiny USA officials and anti-union contractor groups.
Mahoney said she found it hard to fight what she said was the Driscoll campaign's effort to deflect attention toward Destiny USA. Driscoll's forces accused Mahoney in the closing weeks of the campaign of taking thousands of dollars in campaign funds from Destiny employees and executives.
"I don't really want to pile on on the mayor, but he made a very obvious effort to turn the campaign away from Joanie Mahoney and what it was we wanted to talk about and turn it more into a Bob Congel vs. Matt Driscoll kind of race," Mahoney said. "And that was very difficult for me to overcome. I'm certainly not fighting the Destiny battle. I was talking about education, crime, the neighborhoods and I couldn't engage the mayor in conversation on those topics, so it was difficult."
Driscoll also charged that the Republicans were responsible for holding up some of the projects Mahoney had accused him of obstructing.
"I am ready to lead our city for the next four years," Driscoll said. "We will move now on the school construction project. We will move forward with the Excellus project and the Centro bus station that's coming and, yes, Destiny and the Inner Harbor will be settled. Why do we know this? Because we know that with the election over the Republicans will start breaking the log jam they have created to try to fool the people of Syracuse."
Driscoll won big in the city's heavily Democratic 17th Ward, taking it by more than 1,000 votes. Driscoll also ran well on the South Side and narrowly carried Mahoney's home Valley section.
Mahoney carried three of the four wards making up Syracuse's North Side, Eastwood, the 7th Ward in the West End and part of Tipperary Hill, and the 11th Ward, which includes Strathmore and Driscoll's home Winkworth neighborhood.
Mahoney's campaign mobilization effort was impressive.
Travis Glazier, Mahoney's campaign coordinator, said her campaign had 600 volunteers in the field Tuesday, drawn from city dwellers as well as suburban residents concerned about the mayor's impact on the region.
Like Driscoll, Mahoney's forces scoured the city seeking votes. Campaign workers had noted during the past few months which residents responded well to Mahoney when she knocked on their doors.
Tuesday, the Mahoney camp kept track of whether those people had voted, and called the ones who hadn't to urge them to the polls, Glazier said.
Mahoney had obtained a state Supreme Court order Tuesday to impound all paper ballots and voting machines used in the mayor's race, in case the race was close.
As it turned out, Driscoll's victory margin, 1,158 votes, exceeded the 1,006 absentee votes the Onondaga County Board of Elections had received from city voters.
Hawkins, the Green Party candidate, noted that the 4 percent of the vote he received doubled what he polled during his 1997 mayoral bid. "But where we really made gains is putting issues in front of the community," he said.
Hawkins, who advocates bringing cheap public power to Syracuse similar to Solvay and Skaneateles, said he thinks the Driscoll administration and Common Council will seriously consider such a move.
The outcome of Tuesday's race "shows that change is needed in the city," said Onondaga County Republican Chairman Bob Smith. Given the GOP's enrollment disadvantage in the city - there are more than twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans - "this is a pretty close result," Smith said.
"This is a very divided city," he said. "There's a lot of concern about the direction it's going in."
Mahoney Tuesday agreed that her campaign, and the narrow margin of Driscoll's victory, means the themes and issues she ran on will have to be taken into consideration by the administration.
"My campaign was about building up, not tearing down this community," Mahoney said. "I hope this campaign has demonstrated to Matt Driscoll what we truly expect from our city's mayor."
- Staff Writer Mike Fish contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.
Posted by syracusegreens at November 9, 2005 10:35 PM