On election night in 2009, after the first returns were posted showing Bill Thompson narrowly behind Mike Bloomberg, there was an hour or so when the gap between the candidates neither widened nor closed, even as more and more votes were counted. The comptroller was clearly running out of field in which to overtake the mayor. I asked a Thompson staffer when they'd throw in the towel. "We feel like we have a little juice left in southeast Queens," he said. In the end, it wasn't enough, but the staffer was right: While Bloomberg easily bested Thompson in the whole of Queens, the four Assembly districts in the borough's southeast section overwhelmingly preferred the Democrat, some by a four-to-one margin. Read More»

For the third election in a row, Bronx District Attorney Robert T. Johnson and Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown will have no one but themselves to beat on Tuesday.

As was the case in 2003 and 2007, both Johnson (Democrat-Republican-Conservative) and Brown (Democrat-Republican-Conservative) face no opponent, so voters' only choice is which party lever to pull for each man. Neither has faced opposition since 1999, when Johnson—who has held his post since 1989—faced a Republican, and Brown (a DA since 1991) fought off a Green party candidate.

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There were multiple contenders for the role of Quixote in New York City's 2005 mayoral campaign. On the Democratic side there was Anthony Weiner, a young congressman with a punchline for a last name running against better known opponents. The Republicans had Tom Ognibene, a former City Councilman who had the temerity to challenge Mayor Bloomberg for his party's nomination.

Bloomberg's operatives ultimately knocked Ognibene off the ballot, but until that happened he often shared the stage with the Democratic candidates at debates, and he said in a 2005 interview that he had given Weiner a private warning: namely, that his combination stump speech/stand-up routine was going to tarnish his image. "People aren't going to take you seriously," Ognibene told me he told the Brooklyn-Queens rep.

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