However Middle Village Votes No Confidence in Crowley
The sheeple have decided. While Councilmember Crowley has been re-elected to four more years in the City Council, her re-election was anything but a glowing seal of approval from the heart of her district.
Elizabeth Crowley won her re-election by nearly the same margin she had won it in 2009, 58.8% to 41.2% against Craig Caruana. In total, a mere 16,781 people turned out to vote on Election Day, nearly 2,000 less than turned out in 2009 and more than 5,300 less than voted in 2001- the last time we elected a new mayor.
Certainly much of this had to do with the Mayor’s election, which polls concluded was a done deal after the Democratic primary. Similar to the Governor’s election in New Jersey, which saw a low voter turnout because the race was not deemed competitive, New York saw its lower voter turnout in half a century.
The 30th City Council District, which is considered a Republican district that supported Bloomberg and Giuliani by huge margins, went for Joe Lhota by a skin tight margin of 50.4% to 49.6%.
Certainly the low voter turnout and lackluster campaign by Joe Lhota negatively affected Craig Caruana running at the bottom of the ticket. Caruana received just shy of 7,000 votes.
In the area of lower Maspeth and Middle Village, which had the highest voter turnout and is the most civically active populous, Caruana won by a huge margin. In lower Maspeth, the areas below the Long Island Expressway and east of 60th street as well as Middle Village, Caruana received more than 55% of the vote.
This includes the area where Councilmember Crowley has her district office on Dry Harbor Road where Caruana received more than 60% of the vote.
It was the areas that knew Crowley’s record best that didn’t vote for her.
Even Northern Glendale, the areas above Myrtle Avenue, where Crowley and several of her siblings live and raise their families, Crowley received just 159 more votes than Caruana. Not even those areas where Crowley’s name is strongest did she receive a resounding support for her re-election.
They voted in blind allegiance for the “D” next to Crowley’s name only in the new areas of the district which have not experienced life under a Crowley administration like Woodside and Woodhaven and the edges of the district in Ridgewood and lower Glendale which have received no additional support or funding from Crowley.
As the people who live off of Forest Avenue, Myrtle Avenue and Fresh Pond Road continue to see garbage collect in the streets, their quality of life decrease, and crime surge, they can thank the fifteen hundred people who voted for Lhota/Crowley and the thousands more that didn’t even bother to vote at all.
