“MAKE no mistake,” said Bill de Blasio, New York’s new mayor-elect; “the people of this city have chosen a progressive path.” Mr de Blasio thrashed his Republican opponent, Joe Lhota, in the election on November 5th. The lopsided result—73% to 24%—was a rejection of Mr Lhota, a capable administrator (he used to run New York state’s public transport) but not much of a crowd-pleaser. It was also a sign that New Yorkers want something completely different from the sober, data-driven leadership of Michael Bloomberg. They may get it.

The affable Mr de Blasio persuaded voters that he will be mayor for “the 99%”. His critics fear that he will be the mayor for Occupy Wall Street. He will be the first Democrat in City Hall in two decades, which seems odd when one remembers that Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one in New York. (Mr Bloomberg is a Republican-turned-independent.)

Mr de Blasio exudes empathy for those who struggle to pay the rent or put their children through college. He came from a broken family—his father walked out on his mother and later shot himself rather than die of cancer. Mr de Blasio’s own family looks a lot like New York. His wife is African-American, and was a lesbian before she met him. His teenage son sports an impressive Afro. The contrast with Mr Bloomberg, who has $31 billion in his back pocket and cannot plausibly claim to feel the middle class’s pain, is telling. Mr Bloomberg built a financial-data empire from scratch before he first ran for mayor in 2001. Mr de Blasio is a lifelong political operative who has never run a large organisation (his current job is city ombudsman). Mr Bloomberg seems aloof and logical and says things like: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Mr de Blasio has a big smile and a warm manner and gushes about liberation theology. Mr Bloomberg’s wealth allowed him to fund his own election campaigns, leaving him indebted to no one. Mr de Blasio was backed by a legion of interest groups, such as the public-sector unions, who now want payback.

“We are a tale of two cities,” says Mr de Blasio. The gap between rich and poor is wider in New York than in the rest of America (see chart 1). About 30% of New Yorkers spend more than half their income on rent. One cleaner with two kids and a jobless husband complains that she can no longer afford her home in Brooklyn. Her neighbourhood, once gritty, has seen an influx of hipsters and soaring rents. “Two thousand a month? Who can afford that?” she grumbles. Inequality was the focus of Mr de Blasio’s campaign. He blamed Mr Bloomberg, arguing that the mayor’s “hands-off” approach allowed the gap between plebs and plutocrats to grow. He vowed to tax the rich to pay for universal pre-school. This is a worthy project, but New York’s public school system is not obviously short of cash—spending per pupil is nearly $20,000, far more than some private schools spend. And New York’s tax base is precarious. The top 1% of earners (about 35,000 people) pay 43% of the city’s income taxes. Including federal and state taxes, they already face a top marginal rate of 55% or so. Bumping that up by half a percentage point (he would raise the top city rate from 3.9% to 4.4%) may not, in itself, cause them to flee to Florida. But Mr de Blasio’s rhetoric makes many nervous, and his lack of executive experience makes some wonder if he will be competent. To understand what a change Mr de Blasio represents, it is worth reflecting on Mr Bloomberg’s record. He took office three months after the September 11th attacks, when the remains of the World Trade Centre were still smouldering and the economy was fragile. His first task was to reassure a frightened city. He succeeded.

New York has suffered no successful terrorist attack since 2001. At least 16 have failed or been foiled, including a plot to blow up tourists in Times Square. Recognising that the Big Apple was high on al-Qaeda’s list of targets, Mr Bloomberg’s police commissioner, Ray Kelly, set up a counter-terrorism unit headed by David Cohen, a CIA veteran. Among its officers are speakers of Arabic, Urdu and Pushtu, and experts in military intelligence and foreign affairs. Civil libertarians protest that the people this unit snoops on are disproportionately Muslim. Mr Kelly retorts that he is keeping the city safe. He points to a case where the New York Police Department (NYPD) helped the FBI find a suspected terrorist. The police knew that a certain mosque allowed overnight visitors, and there the FBI found their man.

Bullets over, Broadway

Ordinary crime plunged under Rudy Giuliani, Mr Bloomberg’s Republican predecessor. (His police chief found that when you arrest subway fare-dodgers and aggressive beggars, they often turn out to have outstanding arrest warrants for other crimes.) Under Mr Bloomberg, New York became even safer, despite a shrinking police force. Last year saw 419 murders, less than a fifth as many as in 1990, although the city has 1m more people (see chart 2). Crime has fallen twice as far in New York as in the rest of America, says the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank. Its murder rate is about half Boston’s. Mr Bloomberg bragged to your correspondent that she could “walk in any neighbourhood during the day and most at night without looking over your shoulder”. The NYPD crunches data and sends officers where they are most needed. Young men in the roughest areas are stopped, questioned and sometimes frisked to deter them from carrying guns. Mr Bloomberg, one of the most anti-gun mayors in America, says that such policies save lives. But they are controversial. Because high-crime areas are largely black and Hispanic, the police stop and frisk a lot of innocent minority youths. Some accuse the police of racism. Over the summer a federal judge ruled that the police had violated thousands of people’s civil rights and called for a federal monitor to oversee reform. On November 1st another judge overruled her. But this may soon be irrelevant: Mr de Blasio has vowed to roll back “stop-and-frisk”. A safer New York attracts tourists in record numbers: 52m last year, up 40% since 2000. Restaurants are humming; Broadway musicals are packed. Despite the financial crash, the number of private-sector jobs in New York rose by 4% between 2007 and 2012; nationwide, it fell by 3%.

Besides its traditional brainy industries—finance, property and the media—the city now has a thriving technology sector, which generates $30 billion in annual wages. Pay for tech workers is growing even as total pay on Wall Street has fallen (since so many bankers were laid off). Roche, a drugmaker, recently announced that it would move its biotech centre from New Jersey to Manhattan. Since 2007 Brooklyn’s tech cluster has grown faster than that of any large American county save San Francisco. Mr Bloomberg has given land and money to Cornell University and the Technion (an Israeli college) to develop an applied science campus, hoping that this will foster a start-up culture like Silicon Valley’s.

Before 2002, New York’s schools were in poor shape. More than a fifth of students dropped out of high school before graduating. Not one city public school was in New York state’s leading 25, says Mr Bloomberg; today 22 out of 25 are. Mr Bloomberg took control of the schools from a reactionary school board. He closed failing schools, opened smaller ones and allowed some charter schools (which are publicly funded but independently run) to operate. He made principals accountable for test scores and tried to make it easier to sack bad teachers. Overall, he made some progress. In 2003, 20.5% of New York’s pupils were proficient, or better, in maths on national tests; today 29.6% are. Charter schools in Harlem have done particularly well. But the unions hate them and Mr de Blasio means to curb them. Some 20,000 parents protested against his plans last month.

Under Mr Bloomberg New York’s population has grown by about 300,000, to 8.3m. For the first time since 1950, more people are moving into the city than out of it. In 2007 the mayor drew up a 25-year plan for growth (called PlaNYC) which laid the framework for 40% of the city to be rezoned and improved the use of the waterfront. Infrastructure, long ignored, was given priority. Since 2002 the city has committed more than $88 billion to capital infrastructure projects such as subway lines and new parks.

Mr Bloomberg often rubbed his constituents up the wrong way. He closed failing schools without consulting parents. He shut streets with little notice. Doug Muzzio, a political scientist, calls his style “imperial”. He banned smoking in most public places and the sale of fizzy drinks in vast cups. Such nannying annoyed puffers, slurpers and libertarians, but Christopher Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation says it has helped New Yorkers live longer. Life expectancy in the city rose by three years under Mr Bloomberg, for a variety of reasons.

From Mr Data to Mr Dateable

He used data to do boring things well—an undervalued virtue. His analytics team pools data from different agencies to inform decisions. For instance, it tracked complaints from 311 calls, a municipal hotline, and linked them with information about such things as tax irregularities to pinpoint illegal building conversions, which are fire hazards, quickly and fairly accurately. Mr Bloomberg listened to ideas if his staff had supporting evidence.

In short, he has been a highly capable but not terribly sexy mayor. Mr de Blasio’s critics fear that he will be the opposite. Some worry that his victory portends a return to the dangerous streets and dysfunctional government that the city endured in the 1980s. It is far too soon to make that call; having campaigned in poetry, Mr de Blasio may be forced to govern in prose.

But he will face challenges as soon as he takes office. The unions have refused to negotiate new contracts with Mr Bloomberg, because he refused to give them fat pay increases. Having raised money and knocked on doors for Mr de Blasio, they are now hoping that he will raise salaries and backdate the increases. With the city already facing a pensions crunch—it spends more on police pensions than on police wages—that is a recipe for disaster. New Yorkers may yet miss Mr Bloomberg.