As it ‘turns out,’ reelex victory wasn’t that big

A DAY AFTER winning reelection with 66% of the vote, Mayor de Blasio declared that the voters had given him “a mandate.”

In terms of margin of victory, that was certainly true. But 66% of what? A closer look at the election numbers show de Blasio won the support of little more than 14% of the city’s registered voters, due to a low-interest campaign and voter turnout that’s been dwindling for years.

On Tuesday it hit a new low — just 21.7% of the city’s 5 million registered voters bothered to get off the couch to vote for mayor.

De Blasio noted that the number of these voters this time (1.09 million) was higher than in 2013 (1.08 million).

“Despite the obstacles, despite the weather, despite the fact that there was a lot of coverage that said it’s a sure thing, people still came out in strong numbers,” he told the press in City Hall’s Blue Room.

But in mayoral contests from 1989 through 2009, the number of mayoral voters was even higher (1.1 million to 1.8 million).

Meanwhile, the percentage of mayoral votes has dropped nearly every four years.

In 1989, Democrat David Dinkins beat Republican Rudy Giuliani with a 56% mayoral turnout. In 1993, Giuliani beat Dinkins with 54.7% turnout.

Since then, the turnout has stayed below 40%, hitting what appears to be an all-time low Tuesday of just under 22%. So why is this happening? Patricia Swann, senior program officer of the New York Community Trust, a nonprofit that funds civic engagement, theorizes that more citizens have lost the notion that voting influences what happens in their lives.

“There’s not enough of a sense that voting makes a difference anymore,” she said. “It’s more of a lack of awareness that things can be better, that there are a lot of solutions.”