Election Day 2013: six of the most riveting votes

In the off-year elections Nov. 5, Americans are voting to elect two governors and 305 mayors and decide numerous ballot initiatives. Here are six of the day's most gripping votes.

New York City: A lefty landslide in the mayoral race?

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan
Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio embraces his daughter Chiara as he talks to the media after voting Nov. 5 in the Park Slope neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough of New York. His son Dante is at left. Mr. de Blasio is running against Republican candidate Joseph Lhota.

Bill de Blasio, New York City public advocate and a former council member, is poised to cruise to a mayoral victory by a historically high margin in America's largest city. Doing so would end five terms of GOP or independent rule in New York and bring a strikingly liberal political record to City Hall. Mr. de Blasio has pushed for strengthening tenants' rights, increasing affordable housing, changing police "stop and frisk" practices, and narrowing the city's income inequality by raising taxes on high-income New Yorkers.

Republican contender Joe Lhota, former chairman of the city's transit authority, has trailed de Blasio by about 40 points in recent polls.

6 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.