Yet Bloomberg won only a slim majority of all votes cast, garnering 51% to Thompson's 46%. Such a close outcome would ordinarily suggest near parity in name recognition and campaign resources, yet, as the New York Times has reported, "[t]he billionaire mayor had poured $90 million of his own fortune into the race, a sum without equal in the history of municipal politics that gave him a 14-to-1 advantage in campaign spending." In the campaign's final months, Hizzoner spent $15,000 an hour on the bid to retain his office. The $90 million of his personal fortune spent over the course of the campaign on advertising and promotion, divided by the number of votes he received on Election Day (556,946), amounts to a cool $161.59 per vote. While his opponent struggled to raise money, Bloomberg blanketed the airwaves and phone lines; exit polls revealed that many voters received as many as six automated telephone calls from the mayor's campaign.
The fact that approximately one million New York City voters participated on November 3rd in a population of over eight million likely suggests that voter turnout was depressed in proportion to popular disaffection with the perceived monetization of the city's electoral politics. On their face, these diminishing returns seem to undermine the argument that the Bloomberg-Thompson contest demonstrates an immediate need to extend campaign finance reform to certain municipalities or at least strengthen existing regulations to cap permissible expenditures of a candidate's personal wealth--after all, Bloomberg's spending spree likely backfired, so won't wealthy political aspirants heed the lessons of the mayor's unexpectedly small margin of victory? But the circumstances of this particular race will not so neatly apply to future mayoral contests elsewhere. If allowed to dip illimitably into their personal coffers, prosperous unknowns may effectively purchase elections when minimal name recognition forestalls most adverse consequences of Bloombergian profligacy. In any case, the mayor's domineering tactics were a not-so-subtle insult to democracy, and if statutes can be amended to accommodate his indispensable uniqueness, surely the mayor's example has served to illustrate the need for limitations on the use of personal wealth in municipal political campaigns.
