You’ll never see what happened last Tuesday looking through a two-party microscope! Nope. You need an independent historyscope to get this one!

I had the pleasure of hearing independent strategist Jackie Salit give her analysis of the November elections on Sunday night on her regular national conference call which is attended by around 150 activists around the country every six weeks.

Jackie is a long-time independent activist based in New York City, the president of the Committee for a Unified Independent Party (aka IndependentVoting.org), the executive editor of the Neo-Independent Magazine, and the campaign manager of Mike Bloomberg’s Independence Party campaign. She’s someone I follow very closely — and so should you if you care about independent politics.

A statement released by the campaign via email on Wednesday after the election said: This year, the IP delivered 13% of the total votes cast – the largest percentage ever by a minor party for a cross-endorsed mayoral candidate.

The Hankster (my blog) and Donklephant (where I am a guest blogger), in addition to The Independent View (NYC IP activist Michael Drucker’s blog) and the NY Daily News’ Brawl for the Hall blog seemed to be the only media outlets that even referenced this astounding result from the election. And then today, I caught Maine’s independent mayoral candidate Alex Hammers’ post on The Moderate Voice “Independents are a Sleeping Giant“, and a note by Robert Steele on his Public Intelligence Blog.

In the CUIP conference call, Jackie emphasized that, far from being the “margin of victory” for Bloomberg’s win as an independent in NYC, the vote on the IP line was the foundation of the campaign. At a time when the votes of both major parties Dems and Repubs went down, the 15 year old grassroots Independence Party doubled its vote.

It is indeed wonderous that no other media picked this up.

But if your framework is a bipartisan — indeed partisan — system, you don’t pay a lot of attention to the margins, no pun intended! You don’t see what’s happening on the horizon. You’re not looking to the future — you’re looking to the past and how pollsters have been able to parse the vote based on prior elections. Polls are supposed to be predictive. They’re interesting, and we all follow them. But predictive?

You’d have to have a 6-billion-person polling operation to figure that one out. And still, you’d get it wrong because what the NYC mayoral race points to is the power that independents have as an organized force. It’s something like what the unions used to call “strength in numbers” when we still sang Solidarity Forever and meant solidarity forever for everyone.

Old-fashioned as it may be, independents in NYC have banded together, we have talked with each other, we have made endless phone calls night after night year after year, we have fought back against a stupid and vicious state party chair, we have constituted 5 county committees under state law that are directed by a collective 94-person executive committee, and have inched our way forward into NYC politics as players.

We just led New Yorkers to elect our first independent mayor.

In my book this is something that ordinary people can be proud of. And that ordinary people — nonpartisans — all over the country can learn from and emulate.

And indeed they are. Take Joelle Riddle in Durango CO, a former chairwoman of the La Plata County Democratic Party who won her post in 2006 with party support and decided to go independent in August, would have to run as a write-in candidate after inadvertently missing a deadline to change her registration.

“I seek to remedy this burden that falls unequally on small political parties and independent or unaffiliated candidates, unfairly discriminating against them and not affording them the same privileges as the major political parties,” she wrote in a statement announcing her decision Tuesday.

Partisan politics isn’t the future of our country, but the search for an independent alternative might be.

You/we independents can do it. If we’re organized.

-NH

Independent Voters

• On healthcare and other hot issues: Follow the independents–The number of voters not tied to Democrats or Republicans is expanding fast. Both parties need to adjust. (By the Christian Science Monitor’s Editorial Board) Were the 2010 elections to occur today, 43 percent of independents say they would vote Republican (in a generic congressional ballot), while 38 percent would vote Democratic, the Pew Research Center finds. That’s quite a shift from 2006, when independents favored Democrats over Republicans, 44 to 33 percent.

Open Primaries

• South Dakota Democrats Will Allow Independent Voters to Vote in their Primaries (Ballot Access News)
• Re-enfranchising New Yorkers (by Richard Flanagan, Gotham Gazette) Voters overwhelmingly rejected Macchiarola’s plan for nonpartisan elections, 70 percent to 30 percent. But only 13 percent of registered voters bothered to show up for the off-year election of 2003, and many had ties to the unions, interest groups and political clubs that benefit from the status quo and know how to pull the levers of the current system to their advantage. They were loathe to expand the electorate and risk the surrender of power.

Independent Gov Races

In an unsettled political environment where voters are exercising independent options, independent candidates like NJ gubernatorial candidate Chris Daggett pick up support….

• Poll: New Jersey gubernatorial race a virtual tie (From CNN Associate Producer Martina Stewart)
• Daggett gets little help from ballot position (Press of Atlantic City) New Jersey laws reserving the top two spots on any ballot for the two major-party candidates. Last month, Daggett – along with Libertarian Party candidate Kenneth Kaplan – took the step of filing suit against the practice.
• Daggett for guv? Why not? (By ALEX GECAN, For The Trentonian)

Bloomberg 09

NYC Dem machine targets independent run by Mike Bloomberg with 2 darts: money (the Mayor is very wealthy…) and term limits (which the Dem-controlled City Council extended….) Good luck with that! Meanwhile, it’s the NYC Independence and the Working Families Parties that are supplying the spark in this year’s city-wide elections. In a city of 5-1 Dem registration, that’s not good news for clubhouse politics…

• Bloomberg’s Line Dance (BY ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, Daily News/Daily Politics)
• Voters Like Mayor, but Not His Path to 3rd Run (By MICHAEL BARBARO, NY Times)
• New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg received the endorsement of the Hotel and Motel Trades Council (From msnbc’s First Read with Chuck Todd)
• After term limit tiff, Bloomberg still gets hotel endorsement (ELIZABETH BENJAMIN, NY Daily News/Brawl for the Hall) The only union with a major field operation that remains unpledged is 1199, which voted for Thompson during the WFP endorsement process. Neutrality is not out of the question for 1199, a union source said.

For more news headlines for independent voters, see The Hankster

Never one to miss an opportunity, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg may run on the Republican ticket next mayoral election while still remaining a declared independent. Apparently, despite being an apostate to the national party, local borough GOP leaders are willing to let the still-popular mayor put his name on their line.

If you’re keeping score at home that makes Bloomberg a former Democrat turned Republican turned Independent turned quasi-Republican again. In a nation of rigid partisanship, Bloomberg’s ambiguous party affiliations seem almost refreshing. That is if you don’t think they seem downright opportunistic.

I’ve always been rather ambivalent about Bloomberg. He’s smart and a capable manager — party hopping aside, he’s provided stable, middle-of-the-road leadership for New York City. But there’s something uninspiring about the man, a truth even he probably realized when he failed to build grassroots support for an independent run for president. Even those of us in the centrist frame of mind barely gave Bloomberg two looks.

Still, a mayor doesn’t need to play well nationally. New Yorkers like him enough to make his quest for a third term realistic and I doubt many will hold it against him if he shifts (or kinda shifts) party affiliations once again. After all, no matter what letter has sat beside his name, he’s always been the same straight-forward, if not particularly vibrant, guy.

All hail the new Tammany Hall!

From NY Times:

After a spirited, emotional and at times raucous debate, the New York City Council voted, 29 to 22, on Thursday afternoon to extend term limits, allowing Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to seek re-election next year and undoing the result of two voter referendums that had imposed a limit of two four-year terms. (Please refresh this post for latest updates.)

The vote was a major victory for Mayor Bloomberg — a billionaire and lifelong Democrat who was elected mayor as a Republican in 2001, won re-election in 2005, became an independent last year, and decided just weeks ago that he wished to seek a third term for himself in 2009 — and for the Council’s speaker, Christine C. Quinn. But the intense acrimony surrounding the decision left a sharply divided Council and could ultimately damage the mayor’s popularity.

After Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, who presides over the Council, announced the final result at 4:35 p.m., the balcony erupted in shouts of “The city’s for sale!” and “Shame on you!”

I guess Bloomberg isn’t eyeing a 2012 prez run, eh?

And given the current circumstances on Wall Street, my bet is he’ll get.

MarketWatch has the details…

Bloomberg announced Thursday he supports changing the term limits law to run for a third term. Observers have respected Bloomberg for restoring a sense of optimism to a post-9/11 New York City while encouraging tourists to visit, keeping crime low and bolstering the city’s finances.

Bloomberg’s biggest asset in his audacious quest is the fact that nobody else has emerged as his heir apparent. Plus, he can be seen as a soothing influence on a city that is reeling from the financial markets’ meltdown. He offers practical experience from his years of working on Wall Street. It is a great asset to be able to tell voters that you understand their economic problems and can solve them.

Earlier in the year, Bloomberg professed to be studying a run at the White House. When his term expires, he’ll need a job — and a challenge. He’d love to keep the one he has.

What do you think? Smart move? Is he setting himself up for a 2012 run for President?

(UPDATE: Both campaigns rejected the offer because they don’t want to limit it to just one network. Hmmm…)

Now this is a pretty brilliant move…

The guy who has some of the deepest pockets in the world, and could be a VP for either candidate, wants to use that leverage.

From Politico:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and ABC News on Sunday proposed that the presidential nominees hold a joint town hall as a 90-minute network special from Federal Hall, on Wall Street in Lower Manhattan.

Such a joint meeting would be a new twist in the rituals of a national campaign, and would help both candidates promote the message that they want to help put an end to a divisive era in national politics.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has challenged Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) to a series of 12 joint town halls, which would be a more casual version of the formal debates that are a traditional part of general-election campaigns. The partners propose ABC’s Diane Sawyer as a moderator.

Obama’s campaign has indicated interest but has committed to nothing.

My guess is that these town halls will happen. Maybe not as many as McCain wants, but quite a few of them and that’s a ultimately a great thing for democracy.

More from the New Yorker:

White has the security-camera videotape of his time in the McGraw-Hill elevator. He has watched it twice-it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)

Ouch.

It looks like a small device was set off next to a military recruiting station.

Here’s more…

The police said the explosive device involved in the Times Square blast this morning was “roughly similar” to the devices used in two earlier bombings at foreign consulates in Manhattan, in 2005 and 2007, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at an afternoon news conference. The device had been placed in an ammunition box like the kind that can be bought at a military supply store. Officials said that in today’s attack, a man bundled in a gray hooded jacket or sweatshirt was seen riding a bicycle around the recruiting station moments before the explosion. Subways and traffic are running normally through Times Square.

It doesn’t look like the people from the first two incidents have been caught, so don’t hold your breath for this one either.

And, just speculating here, but I doubt this is a foreign terrorist group. Much more likely some radicals stateside wanting to cause some commotion.

More as it develops…

UPDATE:
Here are a couple videos…

Bloomberg talking about the incident…

And some reactions from residents…

More as it develops…