Bill de Blasio was elected New York City’s first Democratic mayor in two decades Tuesday, posting a potentially record landslide victory while running on an unabashedly liberal, tax-the-rich platform that contrasted sharply with billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s record during 12 years in office.
With 51 percent of precincts reporting, De Blasio, the city’s public advocate, had 73 percent of the vote compared with 25 percent for Republican Joe Lhota, former chief of the metropolitan area’s transit agency.
De Blasio, 52, will take office on Jan. 1 as the 109th mayor of the nation’s largest city.
He ran as the anti-Bloomberg, railing against economic inequality and portraying New York as a “tale of two cities” — one rich, the other working class — under the pro-business, pro-development mayor, who made his fortune from the financial information company that bears his name.
“Today you spoke loudly and clearly for a new direction for our city,” de Blasio told a rollicking crowd of supporters at the YMCA in his home neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn, a far cry from the glitzy Manhattan hotel ballrooms that usually host election night parties.
“We are united in the belief that our city should leave no New Yorker behind,” he said. “The people of this city have chosen a progressive path, and tonight we set forth on it together as one city.”
