It’s
less than 48 hours after the Democratic primary for mayor — the party’s most contentious
primary in over a decade — but you wouldn’t know that from a glance around
the party’s headquarters.

The
furnishings are still Spartan at the spacious new digs off University
Avenue, but a rack of campaign literature has
already been changed to reflect Tuesday night’s results. Gone are keycards for
the party’s designated mayoral candidate, Wade Norwood, and City Council
hopeful Lovely Warren. In their place are flyers for successful challengers Bob
Duffy and John Lightfoot. And the routine, workaday atmosphere gives no
indication that the party has just emerged from such a bruising contest.

One
reason for this may be the finality of the primary. Barring a major surprise,
Bob Duffy will be Rochester’s next mayor. Democrats enjoy an overwhelming advantage
in registered voters in the city. Duffy’s victory in the Democratic primary all
but ensures it in November. (Two other Democrats — Tim Mains and Chris Maj
— will be on the November ballot on third-party lines, but they pulled a
small percentage of votes in the primary. Attorney John Parrinello is the
Republican candidate.)

What’s
less certain is the effect Duffy’s victory will have on the internecine
politics of his party. Nearly everybody with an official position in the party
— or the campaigns — released immediate words of goodwill and called for
party unity. And Chairman Joe Morelle betrayed only the slightest hint of
hesitation using the phrase “Mayor Duffy” in a conversation about the party’s
plans for the future.

But
speaking on WXXI election night as the numbers sealing Duffy’s win rolled in,
School Board member and sometime pundit Jim Bowers made this pronouncement:
“The big loser in this is Joe Morelle.”

The
third party chair this year, Morelle supported Norwood first as
co-chair of his campaign and then — shortly after Norwood won the
party’s designation at its spring convention — in his official capacity as
chair. Bowers — a Duffy backer — says Morelle’s support for a losing
candidate will cost him credibility and maybe even his job. (That’s a
suggestion other Duffy supporters have privately made as well.)

“The
party had to deliver” for candidates it designated at its convention, and when
they lose, “that hurts the party,” Bowers says. And that in turn hurts
Morelle’s chairmanship, he says: “That has to weaken people’s expectations of
him.”

But
Bowers is describing a party where Morelle and Gantt work the system to produce
candidates aligned with them. The reality is more nuanced. Morelle and Gantt
may be political allies for the time being, but the two have had their feuds in
the past. And as often as not, Morelle has sided against Gantt and with Molly
Clifford and others now in the Duffy camp.

Morelle
takes predictions of his demise in stride.

“I’m
not sure my political career is over, but I’ll let other people decide,” he
says. But he does not seem worried. At Duffy’s victory party, he says, plenty
of his hitherto opponents pulled him aside to congratulate him for the job he’s
done as party chair. Morelle’s term runs through next September, after which
he’s entertaining plans to run for another two year term.

“I’m
not wedded to it, but it’s my expectation,” Morelle says.

As
for the idea that he’d face resistance before then, Morelle has little
patience.

“I’m
not going to waste my time thinking about Jim Bowers or others who want a
change,” he says. “I think there’ll be people in each of the camps who will
have their personal agendas and will try to lay that over what’s happening
here.” Then, as if in deference to his role as the party peacemaker, he adds:
“We’re going to work very hard to bring them together.”

Morelle, along
with many party-minded Democrats, will be saying things like that a lot in the next few
months. If they’re serious, they’ll have to grapple with one obstacle to unity
that dwarfs the rest: race.

Speaking
to the Democrat and Chronicle in the
aftermath of his protรฉgรฉ Wade Norwood’s defeat, Assemblymember David Gantt
cited race as the deciding factor. And that’s true — to a point. The
districts Norwood took are majority
black districts, just as those Duffy carried tend to be mainly white. But a
closer look at the numbers shows that Duffy made inroads into predominantly
minority communities; Norwood’s margin of victory in the three districts he
carried was less the Duffy’s in many of his districts.

And
race wouldn’t be as huge an issue for the recuperating party if it hadn’t been
actively used in the campaign.

City
Councilman Adam McFadden drew heavy criticism for creating Norwood shirts
bearing the slogan “Don’t sell out.” They were widely viewed as being targeted
at African Americans considering voting for Duffy. The comments section of WHAM
radio talk-show host Bob Lonsberry’s website sprouted racist attacks on Norwood. That in turn
prompted the Norwood campaign to criticize Duffy for not distancing himself
from Lonsberry. And Norwood received the last-minute blessing of civil-rights
activist Al Sharpton. (Whether this helped or hurt is unclear; in New York
City, which is big enough to have regular polls on this kind of thing,
Sharpton’s eleventh-hour endorsement of Fernando Ferrer appears to have hurt
him more among whites than it helped him among blacks.)

Perhaps
the biggest act of racial politics was reserved for the final days of the
campaign, when a flyer bearing Gantt’s photo instructed recipients to vote only
for a slate of six candidates. All but one were black, and prominent white
candidates, like Bill Pritchard and Carolee Conklin, who were also designated
by the party, were left off.

That
caused some, including Bowers, to see a “race-based strategy” on the part of
Gantt and his supporters. Morelle downplays such notions. “I think race played
less of a factor than people think,” he says. But he is severe in his
denunciation of the flyer.

“That
piece of literature did not represent the feelings of the Democratic Party,” he
says, and then a moment later says it again. The flyer “was frankly just
wrong,” he adds.

Even
if everybody in the party agreed with that, healing party divisions that have
swelled to encompass racial animosity will not make the task of building unity
any easier.

This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.