Bill’s mandate to win

Mayor de Blasio, past the formality of a nothingburger primary campaign, enters the general election styling himself as a mayor for the common man and woman: dragon-slayer of powerful landlords, provider of pre-K for all kids, commander-in-chief of a civil-rights-embracing NYPD, taxer of the super-rich to provide for the elderly and poor.

That common man and woman? In Tuesday’s primary, they shrugged.

Just 14% of active registered Democrats bothered to vote — well below even the mere 24% who turned out four years ago, in a competitive primary. Of those, three-quarters went for de Blasio.

New York has seen primaries with worse turnouts. (Anyone here vote for Bill Thompson in 2009? Bueller?) But for an incumbent mayor in the throes of what he considers a revolution empowering the masses to have so little wind at his back suggests a troubling disconnect.

In accepting the nomination, de Blasio reclaimed and then supersized his governing mandate, quoting from Picasso: “Everything you can imagine is real.” High-paying jobs. A millionaires’ tax to pay for subway fixes and half-price MetroCards for the poor. A mansion tax to subsidize rents for seniors.

He saw Tuesday’s vote as “ratification of all that we’ve been doing together” to “build a fairer city.”

But for now, that “we” amounts to just one in 10 of the city’s Democratic voters.

The mayor has a choice as he embarks upon the general election: Aim to do just what is necessary to win by vilifying his chief opponent, Republican Nicole Malliotakis, as a Donald Trump clone and rely on union turnout machines to do the rest.

Or make an earnest effort to engage the broader city in a vision that gives people something positive to vote for — and, in the process, ultimately win a genuine reelection mandate.

According to pollsters, only about half of New Yorkers now say the city’s on the right track. About half approve of the job de Blasio’s doing.

That’s no doubt because many can’t see themselves in a political program that divides New Yorkers into the afflicted and the comfortable, with government as the infallible leveler.

Some look at their rising property tax bills and the swelling size of the city budget and wonder how much longer de Blasio can sustain ever-expanding Robin Hood ambitions.

Some hear an endless string of sanctimonious proclamations about statues and the like and ask why de Blasio hasn’t delivered better nuts-andbolts results on homelessness or jail violence.

Some see special interests and public-sector unions who’ve had an inside track to influence, and justifiably ask who in City Hall gives the unconnected a fair hearing.

Any victory de Blasio wrings from an unmoved populace will be a shallow one.

The mayor must connect with a broad-based swath of the city’s voters, including its large and often forgotten middle class, in order not just to win, but rally the people to his side.

Picasso painted pictures. De Blasio has confidence to earn. And then a city to govern.