Democratic presidential candidate New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio takes the stage at the

Democratic Presidential Debate on July 31, 2019.

 Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Most people would not insist on working out 11 miles from their home when there’s a perfectly good
gym just around the corner, especially when they’ll be roundly criticized by millions of people for it. But
most people are not Bill de Blasio.

That’s the thing about the New York City mayor: De Blasio’s gonna de Blasio, whether you like it or not.
A lot of people, well, don’t.

De Blasio, who looked at the 20-something-deep 2020 presidential field in May and decided to toss his
hat into the ring anyway, is a pretty unpopular figure in both local and national politics. Most New
Yorkers don’t want him to run for president, and they’re blasé on the job he’s doing as mayor (though
there’s a racial component that I’ll get to later). Among the Democratic primary field, candidates’
favorability tends to track with their name recognition, meaning the more Democratic voters know them,
the more they like them. Except for de Blasio.

Why don’t people like the mayor of America’s largest city? There’s no single explanation.

Policy-wise, a lot of de Blasio’s record is strong, and he’s essentially delivered on what he set out to do
when campaigning for mayor: He delivered universal pre-K and expanded paid sick leave, reduced
stop-and-frisk policing, and oversaw the city’s $15 minimum wage hike. New York’s economy is strong
and crime rates are low, though homelessness remains a problem. De Blasio has steadily progressed
up New York City’s political ranks over 30 years and was reelected mayor in 2017 with 67 percent of
the vote. As FiveThirtyEight’s Chadwick Matlin notes, de Blasio “was progressive before it was cool.”

Rather, de Blasio’s issue largely seems to be one of style. De Blasio can come off as sanctimonious,
arrogant, stubborn, and preachy about the gravity and scope of what he’s doing. He can be perceived
as caring more about big-picture symbolism than the day-to-day grind of city policy, and he’s not
particularly charismatic. To make matters worse, he has a fractious relationship with the New York
press — which tends to drip out into national media, since so many media companies are based in New
York — and neither he nor they seem particularly inclined to try to fix it. And to some extent, New
Yorkers are always going to hate the mayor they have, whoever it is.

“The issue is people don’t like him, and he doesn’t care,” said Rebecca Katz, a former longtime de
Blasio adviser and founder of consulting firm New Deal Strategies. She added, “In terms of New York
City being a beacon of progressive leadership, he’s made some really strong strides, but his personality
has left some to be desired.”

Bill de Blasio is unpopular among white New Yorkers

Before delving into why de Blasio is unpopular, it’s important to point out among whom  he is unpopular,
because it’s not everyone.

According to an April Quinnipiac University poll, 42 percent of New Yorkers approve of the job de Blasio
is doing as mayor, and 44 percent disapprove. But when you break it down by race, the numbers tell a
different story: De Blasio’s approval rating is 31-58 percent among white voters, 33-44 percent among
Asian voters, 40-40 percent among Hispanic voters, and 66-23 percent among black voters. In other
words, de Blasio does poorly among white New York voters. Among voters of color, it’s a different story.

“The whole cocktail party circuit loathes Bill de Blasio, and he takes so much pleasure in that, and it’s a
perfect storm of crass,” Katz said. When de Blasio ran for mayor in 2013, he did so on a theme of a
“tale of two cities” — one for rich elites and moneyed interests, and another for everyone else.

“He told people who thought they were part of the solution that they were part of the problem and that
they would never be able to understand that because they themselves were not subject to policing and
other problems,” one New York political operative said.

Of course, it’s not just white elites who are turned off by de Blasio. Democratic Rep. Max Rose, who in
2018 defeated former Republican Rep. Dan Donovan in historically right-leaning Staten Island, ran
explicitly against de Blasio in his congressional race. He even ran a campaign ad attacking de Blasio.
It makes sense that de Blasio would be unpopular among the city’s working-class whites, who likely
agree with “Blue Lives Matter” and other sentiments opposing the racial justice themes that de Blasio
has campaigned and governed on.

When things are bad, de Blasio has a tendency to … not make them better
One of the signature anecdotes about de Blasio among New Yorkers is that he works out at the YMCA
in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which is very far from Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side, where he lives.
Over the years, he’s caught a lot of flak for it — taking a private car accompanied by a police
escort isn’t good for the environment, New York City traffic doesn’t need more cars on the road, and it
just seems like some silly posturing on his part. That being said, it’s not some sort of dire transgression.

The situation, as trivial as it seems, actually says a lot about who de Blasio is and why he can rub
people the wrong way: All he has to do for this little controversy to go away is find another gym. And he
just won’t.

“Sometimes [de Blasio’s] stridence is good; you want that in your leaders,” one former aide said.
“Sometimes it’s silly and stubborn.”

The mayor has dug in on his antagonistic relationship with the press. Beyond national politicians such
as the president and congressional leadership, the mayor of New York City probably has one of the
biggest press corps dedicated to him or her of any political figure in the country. It’s important to
cultivate relationships with reporters — except de Blasio won’t. The result is a vicious cycle of
antagonism on both sides. Perhaps not uncommon among executives, de Blasio  has a reputation for
tardiness. So when he arrives late to press conferences, reporters tweet about their annoyance at his
lateness, and then when he does show up, he’s condescending. Neither side is entirely in the wrong —
as Katz put it, “there are no heroes” in the situation — but de Blasio just doesn’t use the press to his
advantage.

“It’s a give-and-take relationship, and if there’s hostility, especially by the person being covered, that
doesn’t help,” one longtime de Blasio adviser said. “It is just not a very good relationship, and that is a
two-way street.”

It’s worth noting it hasn’t always been this way. When de Blasio was a public advocate, the relationship
with the press wasn’t as bad (though he also wasn’t covered nearly as much), and after he was elected
in 2013, the dynamic seemed positive. He appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in 2014 and
poked fun at his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, and himself. (De Blasio has been mocked for eating
pizza with a fork and knife — a New York no-no — and he and Stewart did a bit about it; they also
brought out a giant soda, a dig at Bloomberg’s attempted soda ban.) The same year, the de Blasio
family affably took part in the annual Mermaid Parade in Coney Island.

But the relationship has soured — de Blasio’s presidential campaign hasn’t yet scheduled a town hall
on CNN or MSNBC. (The campaign says that they are in talks with both networks.)

Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, alongside soccer star Megan Rapinoe.
 
Brian Ach/WireImage
Some of the de Blasio hate is petty, and some of it isn’t
As you might have noticed, some of the criticism de Blasio gets isn’t exactly on the biggest of issues
(the gym, the pizza eating). There are more examples — he’s a Red Sox fan in a city with two major
baseball teams, he reportedly sometimes naps in his office, he one time accidentally dropped (and
maybe killed) a groundhog. De Blasio’s social media presence is sometimes cringeworthy —
his attempt to brand President Donald Trump #ConDon, which is Spanish for condom, is not great.

When the complaints are substantive, they are sometimes over things he can’t control — such as the
subway, which falls under the authority of the state and Gov. Andrew Cuomo. In 2018, New York City
released thousands of pages of de Blasio’s emails with outside consultants after a long court battle with
local media outlets. There was nothing hugely damning in them, but seeing anyone’s private
communications generally doesn’t help a person look good in the public eye. (Just ask Hillary Clinton.)

Still, some of the issues are legitimate.

De Blasio has come under fire for his handling of the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who
died in 2014 after being confronted by police in Staten Island for allegedly selling untaxed loose
cigarettes. One of the officers, Daniel Pantaleo, put him in a department-prohibited chokehold — in
footage of the incident, Garner can be heard saying “I can’t breathe” multiple times.

The Department of Justice has decided not to file charges against Pantaleo, who remains on paid desk
duty at the NYPD. De Blasio has declined to fire Pantaleo, and at the second round of Democratic
debates in July, hecklers shouted, “Fire Pantaleo!” during his and Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-NJ) opening
statements. De Blasio’s campaign said it’s up to the police commissioner, not the mayor.

There are ethics questions around de Blasio. One of his former fundraisers was convicted of conspiring
to bribe NYPD officials. Another campaign donor pleaded guilty to trying to bribe de Blasio to get
favorable lease terms for a restaurant he owned in Queens. New York City’s Department of
Investigation found de Blasio violated conflict of interest rules in soliciting donations from people
seeking favors, according to a recent report from the city. In 2017, federal and state
prosecutors declined to bring criminal charges against de Blasio and his aides after probes into his
campaign fundraising practices.

And sometimes, his public posturing can be contrived. De Blasio initially courted Amazon and
encouraged New Yorkers to welcome its since-abandoned second headquarters project in Long Island
City. But then when Amazon backed out, he turned against the company and criticized its decision as
“the 1 percent dictating to everyone else.” People noticed the flip, especially as 2020 speculation grew.

The 2020 run is not helping

Before de Blasio announced his 2020 presidential campaign in May, someone put up a flyer at his
gym reading “by entering these premises you agree not to run for President of the United States in
2020 or any future presidential race.” In March, Politico quoted a former aide calling the idea of a 2020
de Blasio campaign “fucking insane.”

De Blasio decided to run anyway, and it’s made his public standing worse, not better. “The run for
president has reinforced what a lot of people believe,” said Josh Greenman, the opinion editor at the
New York Daily News.

The press, with its predisposition to criticize de Blasio, has pilloried and mocked the mayor for his likely
doomed presidential run. (According to a RealClearPolitics average, de Blasio is at 0.5 percent support
in the polls.) When there was a major blackout in Manhattan in mid-July, de Blasio was campaigning in
Iowa. It was not a good look, even if there wasn’t much he could do about the situation, wherever he
was.

It’s a conundrum any 2020 candidate is going to face — missing some sort of event they should have
otherwise been present for because they’re on the campaign trail. For the many senators and
representatives in the race, they miss votes and hearings. In de Blasio’s case, there are a lot of things
happening in New York City all the time, and with voters and the press paying a lot of attention, he’ll run
into trouble over campaigning. “He actually, unlike other candidates in the race, is forced to do things
every day that have tension in them,” Eric Phillips, de Blasio’s former press secretary, said.

To be sure, de Blasio isn’t the only New York City mayor to harbor national ambitions. Rudy Giuliani ran
for president after leaving office. Bloomberg has very publicly toyed with the idea. And de Blasio isn’t
the only mayor to be unpopular. Giuliani’s approval declined during his tenure prior to 9/11;
Bloomberg’s approval rating took a hit after the financial crisis. With no third term to run for (a rare
exception the New York City Council granted to Bloomberg in 2008 that was rescinded by referendum
two years later), New York mayors have executive experience chops that make a presidential run seem
natural — if all too often unsuccessful.

“New Yorkers like to hate the mayor they have,” Greenman said.

De Blasio is in a tough hole of unlikability that he can’t get out of. His thus far ill-fated 2020 bid, like the
Park Slope gym, is emblematic of what seems to be at the core of his problem: Most people, seeing
that they have virtually no chance of winning and knowing the public backlash they’re going to face,
wouldn’t run for president. Not Bill de Blasio.