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Mayoral Races of ’70s Offer Similarities, if Little Insight, to the Current Field

From left, Bella S. Abzug, Herman Badillo, Mayor Abraham D. Beame, Mario M. Cuomo, Joel Harnett, Edward I. Koch and Percy E. Sutton after a heated mayoral debate in 1977. The election was held amid a backdrop of looting, a recent blackout, a serial killer and financial crises.Credit...Fred Conrad/The New York Times

In 1973, the early front-runner’s campaign for New York City mayor stalled after revelations that he had refused to answer questions from a grand jury. A former mayor flirted with running again to derail would-be successors. A runoff was imposed to guard against a weak candidate winning the Democratic primary, as had happened four years earlier, and, not incidentally, to hamper a black or Hispanic candidacy.

In 1977, a serial killer was holding the city hostage. A blackout led to looting and thousands of arrests. A financial crisis added to the sense of a city in turmoil. Against that backdrop, the freshman incumbent, Abraham D. Beame, was struggling to fend off six challengers and avoid being the first elected mayor in more than half a century to be dumped after one term.

This year’s mayoral campaign in New York is shaping up as the most heavily contested — and unpredictable — in four decades, since 1973 when, like this year, there was no incumbent, and 1977, when the election was transformed into a referendum on Mr. Beame’s leadership.

The city today is much different — far less crime, relatively stable finances and an electorate that has shifted from heavily Jewish to one dominated by minority voters. But like those two earlier races, the 2013 campaign is filled with intrigue and is difficult to predict.

The chief take-away from 1973 and 1977 is that being a front-runner early on does not necessarily matter when the votes are counted.

This year, no candidate in the field of 11 so far is considered a shoo-in.

In a heavily Democratic city where the party’s candidates have lost the last five mayoral races, no popular consensus has emerged even about what New Yorkers want in a new mayor, much less which candidate would be best equipped to lead the city.

In 1973, polls showed Representative Mario Biaggi of the Bronx to be the front-runner in the months before the Democratic primary. Then news emerged that he had secretly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in responding to questions from a federal grand jury looking at, among other things, his ties to a racetrack owner.

A former mayor, Robert F. Wagner, briefly considered running to try to thwart the aspirations of other candidates, including Mr. Biaggi. And it was the first time a runoff was imposed because no candidate received 40 percent of the vote in a primary.

As it turned out, Mr. Biaggi wound up third in the field of four major candidates. Mr. Beame, then the comptroller, came in first but did not earn enough votes to avoid a runoff against Herman Badillo, a Bronx congressman hoping to become the city’s first mayor of Puerto Rican descent.

But Mr. Badillo’s ill-advised derision of Mr. Beame as “a malicious little man” during a particularly nasty debate helped seal his fate.

Mr. Beame won the runoff, 61 percent to 39 percent, and was easily elected the city’s first Jewish mayor in November, succeeding John V. Lindsay, who had chosen not to run.

“It wasn’t clear who was going to follow him, so you ended up flooding the field,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. “No one could stake a strong claim.”

By 1977, the city had plunged into a financial crisis and Mr. Beame’s competency became a central issue.

It was a slugfest in which Mr. Beame faced former Representative Bella S. Abzug; Representatives Badillo and Edward I. Koch; the Manhattan borough president, Percy E. Sutton; Mario M. Cuomo, the New York secretary of state; and Joel Harnett, a civic leader whose major contribution to the campaign was a lawsuit that prompted the release of a federal report criticizing the mayor’s stewardship.

Mr. Beame had been expected to serve only one term and to endorse Mr. Sutton, who would have been the city’s first black mayor. But, buffeted by the city’s brush with bankruptcy, he opted instead for personal and political vindication by seeking another term.

Gov. Hugh L. Carey engineered the Liberal Party endorsement for Mr. Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, and pledged to support him regardless of who won the Democratic primary — leaving Mr. Beame, the presumed front-runner, “dumbstruck,” as he put it.

When Mr. Beame declared his candidacy for the September primary, he and Ms. Abzug were still considered the two front-runners. Mr. Koch was believed to have no sizable constituency outside his East Side district, and Mr. Cuomo seemed to have no compelling identity. By late August, though, they had inched within striking distance.

“The best-known figures, Abe Beame and Bella Abzug, were the front-runners, and the least known, Cuomo and Koch, emerged in the end as the real competitors,” said Mark Penn, who was Mr. Koch’s pollster. “It was really a wide open field in which the next generation of political figures emerged as the winners.”

Mr. Koch attached himself at the hip to Bess Myerson, a former Miss America, to help deflect rumors that he was gay, rumors that some Cuomo supporters sought to capitalize on.

On primary night, Mr. Koch and Mr. Cuomo were the top two finishers, with Mr. Beame close behind.

Mr. Koch beat Mr. Cuomo in the runoff and went on to win the general election.

“How do long shots win?” said Doug Muzzio, a professor of public policy at Baruch College. “They brand themselves. Ed Koch branded — re-branded — himself as a law-and-order reform liberal. The bottom line is that in a segmented field, you organize and get out the tribe. And what the results say is that pre-election polling was relatively meaningless. Right up to the election it could have been any one of them.”

A similar wide open dynamic is at play this year, said Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant. “Now we have everybody splitting in a nonideological environment, and that means anything can happen.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Mayoral Races of ’70s Offer Similarities, if Little Insight, to the Current Field. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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