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Photo by: NYers for Thompson
On election night in 2009, after the first returns were posted showing Bill Thompson narrowly behind Mike Bloomberg, there was an hour or so when the gap between the candidates neither widened nor closed, even as more and more votes were counted. The comptroller was clearly running out of field in which to overtake the mayor. I asked a Thompson staffer when they’d throw in the towel. “We feel like we have a little juice left in southeast Queens,” he said. In the end, it wasn’t enough, but the staffer was right: While Bloomberg easily bested Thompson in the whole of Queens, the four Assembly districts in the borough’s southeast section overwhelmingly preferred the Democrat, some by a four-to-one margin.