George E. Pataki won the governorship on the strength of sweepingly high voter turnout in the upstate areas that make up his base, where nearly 70 percent of registered voters went to the polls on Tuesday, compared to just under half in New York City and just over half in the suburban counties around it. Those differences demonstrated the profound lack of enthusiasm for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo in the downstate areas where he needed extraordinary voter turnout to win, and reflected a sweeping change in urban voter participation since Mr. Cuomo's first election in 1982, when turnout was just over 70 percent statewide and 66 percent in the city.
"The turnout upstate was appropriate, given the competitiveness of the race and the interest it generated," said Gerald Benjamin, a professor of political science at the State University at New Paltz. "The turnout downstate wasn't. Why? It suggests that the Cuomo vote was simply not energized, and that a lot of people, confronted with their unhappiness about the Governor, and uncertainty about Pataki's qualifications, just didn't vote.
"The Governor got them partway to his column downstate," added Professor Benjamin, a former Republican county legislator in Ulster County. "But not all the way."
In fact, the city's share of total votes cast statewide -- about one-third -- remained roughly comparable to its share in gubernatorial elections since 1982, as did the upstate share, which accounted for nearly half of all votes. That confirmed a steady northward shift in the electoral power base because of higher turnout upstate, and made a higher plurality in the city all the more vital for Mr. Cuomo. The vote in the suburban counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland, generally about one-quarter of the total, shrank to just over one-fifth, and Mr. Cuomo lost there, badly in Nassau and Suffolk and more narrowly in the Hudson Valley suburbs.
"I'm amazed at the bifurcation of the vote upstate and downstate," said Meyer S. Frucher, a Cuomo campaign adviser. "This election, in a profound way, has made New York two states."
One of the Governor's Democratic ticket-mates, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, outpolled him by better than 250,000 votes statewide, and another, Comptroller H. Carl McCall, ran well ahead of Mr. Cuomo in most upstate counties and became the only Democratic state official to win as voters zig-zagged across their ballots, picking Republicans and Democrats by turns.
On Election Night, two of Mr. Cuomo's strategists -- his media adviser, David Garth, and the state Liberal Party leader, Raymond B. Harding -- suggested that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's endorsement of the Governor may well have backfired, allowing Mr. Pataki to rile upstate voters by casting the contest as an upstate -downstate struggle. That may well have been so, though the heavily Republican upstate districts already had a big incentive to come out to support their party's most formidable candidate in 12 years.
Put another way, Mr. Giuliani's support clearly failed to help enough in the city and suburbs. A review of past election results showed that Mr. Cuomo won substantially more votes this year than he did in 1990 in the city neighborhoods where Mr. Giuliani ran strongest last year. But those gains were more than offset by increases for the Republican candidate, which reduced Mr. Cuomo's past margins of victory in such neighborhoods.
Similarly, Mr. Cuomo increased his tallies from four years ago in black neighborhoods in the city, though the Giuliani endorsement may have backfired there, too. Despite aggressive efforts by the Democrats to turn out black voters, even Mr. McCall, who became the first black official elected statewide, fell 5,000 and 10,000 votes short of the tallies won by Mayor David N. Dinkins in black neighborhoods in his losing campaign to Mr. Giuliani last year -- tallies already significantly lower than Mr. Dinkins's totals in his winning race in 1989.
"To get to the Mayor's numbers would have been no easy feat," said Mr. Dinkins's old campaign manager and vote-pulling expert, Bill Lynch, who led the get-out-the-vote drive for Mr. Cuomo. "That was our goal, and we did everything we could to get there. We got better than the Governor ever did in the African-American community."
By contrast, the Pataki strategy of imploring voters not to waste their ballots on the independent candidate, B. Thomas Golisano, apparently paid off handsomely. Mr. Pataki defeated Mr. Golisano by two to one in Mr. Golisano's home county of Monroe, territory the Cuomo camp hoped -- and the Pataki camp feared -- the Rochester businessman might actually win.
Just as New York State's national influence has waned steadily since it last produced a President in Franklin Roosevelt a half century ago -- Texas surpassed it this year as the second-largest state -- so the city's influence in state politics has steadily diminished since Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller's empire building of the 60's. Mr. Pataki will be the first Governor since at least early this century to have so little political or personal connection to the sidewalks of New York.
The painful truth from the Democrats' perspective, however, is that the city remains a sleeping giant, with Brooklyn alone the single biggest county in the state. Together, the five boroughs hold 3.2 million registered voters, compared with two million in the suburbs and 3.6 million upstate.
"The reality is we have no organization left at all in any county in the city," one top Democratic strategist said. "If anybody could really put it together, we'd never lose. But even here, you can't get people to come out and support you when you only ask at the last minute."
