By Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BROOKLYN — Well, now we know why Bloomberg spent all that money.

It can now be told that the Bloomberg campaign sharpies always expected a closer race than most people thought it would be and the polls showed.

This was the reason the campaign made an unprecedented effort to obtain community-newspaper endorsements. Another dynamic factored in was the sentiment of many people about term limits. The Bloomberg people knew that going the City Council route to “change� the law would be politically costly but safer than doing a referendum.

Also, Democratic candidate Billy Thompson didn’t scare anyone like his two predecessors did. While he wasn’t a ball of fire, and never has been one, he also wasn’t a ball of mush.

The reality that people who are more or less satisfied with things frequently don’t vote also was realized.

The campaign workers thus spent a lot of money, especially on the hard business of identifying their voters and doing everything they could to get those supporters to vote. They called registered Democrats in moderate- to high-income neighborhoods, sometimes repeatedly to pin down those supporters.

And about 3:30 p.m. our doorbell rang on Election Day, and a campaign worker with a clipboard and identification asked if Dennis, Susan and Matthew had voted.

I have never seen that kind of door-to-door street work before on Election Day. Other than physically taking a voter to the polls and standing inside the machine with the voter, that kind of street effort is the best one can do.

It requires a great deal of effort and organization to pull that off and a lot of money.

In Brooklyn, Bloomberg carried only eight of the 21 Assembly Districts, but those votes were far more than enough for his margin of victory of about 51,000 votes citywide. The closest race of the five boroughs was in Brooklyn.

What passed for a national lesson in demographics was verified on Election Day. Obama’s margin of victory last year came largely from first-time voters or from those who seldom vote. They can’t be taken for granted.

The margins of victory for both Republican candidates for governor in New Jersey and Virginia were that those Obama supporters didn’t vote and those who voted for McCain did.

Congressional Democratic candidates next year must make a specific and dedicated effort to solicit those voters. This won’t be easy and it will prove costly but it must be done in those districts that Obama did well in.

So, before we know it, political junkies will start focusing on next year’s race for governor, which promises to be, at least in the early stages, something like the Perils of Pauline. How long that lasts will depend on what Governor Paterson does.

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