No, not Michael Bloomberg. It’s Comptroller-elect John Liu.

According to unofficial results, Liu got 696,330 votes, with 652,511 on the Democratic line, and 43,819 on the WFP line.

The second-highest total belonged to Bill de Blasio, in the public advocate’s race. He got 672,383 votes. 627,390 came on the Democratic line and 44,993 from the WFP line.

Michael Bloomberg got 557,059 votes in total. 414,242 came from the Republican line and 142,817 came from the Independence Party.

Bill Thompson, the Democratic nominee for mayor, got 478,521 on the Democratic line, and only 27,196 from the WFP line. It's worth noting that even though Thompson got the WFP endorsement, he did not get a bulk of the unions that make up the WFP on board with his campaign. 1199 SEIU and the United Federation of Teachers stayed neutral in the mayor's race, while 32BJ and the Hotel and Motels Trade Council endorsed Bloomberg.

And here are some other factoids readers have noticed:

Mark Green got 150,000 more votes losing in 2001 than Bloomberg got winning yesterday (710,000 to 550,000). "Obviously, turnout in 2001 was about 40% compared to yesterday's 25%," this reader said.

Another reader noticed turnout for the mayor's race yesterday was down, compared to four yeas ago. But it was up in the two other citywide races.

Mayor

2005: 1,289,666

2009: 1,100,649

Change: -189,017

Public Advocate

2005: 827,513

2009: 874,847

Change: +47,334

Comptroller

2005: 805,452

2009: 916,523

Change: +111,071

They’re major unions with well-proven Get Out the Vote operations. It’s also worth noting that they are part of the labor coalition that runs the Working Families Party which, as an umbrella organization, backed another candidate in the race, Richard Aborn.

Other W.F.P. constituent-unions joining 1199 and 32Bj in backing Vance are RWDSU and the teachers union.

"It is with great pride and excitement that we endorse two outstanding leaders who are great friends of our union and staunch advocates for working families," the union's president, George Gresham, said in a public statement. "1199 members are proud to stand with Bill and John and we look forward to doing everything in our power to get them both elected."

1199 SEIU is one of the major partners of the Working Families Party, a labor-backed organization which has already endorsed both de Blasio and Liu (after some donations to the party were made).

During the Working Families Party vote for mayor, 1199 SEIU voted to back Bill Thompson over Michael Bloomberg.

Al Sharpton had just stepped out of a meeting with Barack Obama.

It was January 2007, and he was down in the Obama Senate office during a trip to Washington to meet with a number of Democratic presidential contenders. Mr. Obama had been almost uncannily pitch-perfect, Mr. Sharpton thought, hitting every talking point and preempting every question.

As he was leaving, he caught sight of a familiar face in the reception area of the office.

“I said, ‘That looks like Patrick.’ And Patrick starts laughing,” Mr. Sharpton said. 

At the airport on the way back to New York, he said, he had a further revelation.

“It hit me when I got to the shuttle that a lot of what Obama was saying meant that he must have been talking to Patrick Gaspard," Mr. Sharpton said. "Obama made me feel like he knew every move I made. I said, ‘Patrick did it again.’”

Earlier this year, Mr. Gaspard, a Brooklyn-based, 41-year-old Democratic operative, succeeded Karl Rove as the White House director of the office of political affairs. Unlike Mr. Rove, Mr. Gaspard is at his most comfortable making his presence felt without actually being seen.

“He’s become a real player in the White House, the president himself told me,” said Representative Gregory Meeks.  “He’s a low key, behind-the-scenes, no-fingerprints kind of guy. I need something, I call Patrick. And if he calls, it’s a big deal. He’s close to the president.”

Mr. Gaspard’s official responsibility is to provide the president with an accurate assessment of the political dynamics affecting the work of his administration, and to remain in close contact with powerbrokers around the country to help push the president’s agenda.

In practice, he’s something of an all-purpose fixer, if not the carte blanche policy architect that Mr. Rove was for George W. Bush, or the number-one politics guru that David Axelrod is for Mr. Obama.

And while he looks after the president’s interests in Washington, he also uses his position as a lever to manage politically messy situations closer to home.

Earlier this month, for example, when a Republican coup in the State Senate threw Albany into chaos—with potential implications for the congressional redistricting process in 2010--Mr. Gaspard began making calls.

Mr. Gaspard was in touch with Governor David Paterson, according to multiple sources familiar with the conversations. He also called Hiram Monserrate, one of the two Democratic legislators whose defection cost his party its 32-30 majority in the Senate.  

The two, who have known each other for years, spoke continuously in the hours and days after the coup. According to one source familiar with the substance of the calls, Mr. Monserrate twice asked for Mr. Gaspard to get the White House involved, and was twice rejected.

Soon after, Mr. Monserrate declared himself back in the Democratic fold.

Mr. Gaspard’s political sensibilities were formed in part by his cosmopolitan (almost Obama-esque) personal background.

He was born in present-day Democratic Republican of the Congo to Haitian parents, but raised in America, in Manhattan and Queens.

He writes poetry and considers as a personal hero Aimé Césaire, the pioneering black-pride poet and politician who taught the anti-colonialist theorist Frantz Fanon. He also likes Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet of the Acmeist school.

He has acted in plays and performed spoken word, holds strongly positive opinions about Otis Redding and collects Marvel comics. (His prize possession is the first issue of Conan the Barbarian.) He is a big Mets fan. He was married on the grass of Prospect Park; his wife and two children are about to join him in Washington after living for years in Park Slope.

He jogs regularly and lives cleanly.

“Let me put it to you this way,” former city councilwoman Margarita Lopez, an old boss of Mr. Gaspard, recalled telling Obama vetters who asked her if he ever used drugs or alcohol. “That man doesn’t drink Coca Cola.”

 He can be brutal, though.

“Don’t be mistaken about him being a gentleman--don’t even go there,” said Ms. Lopez. “When a situation got to a point that there was no resolution I would reach Patrick and say, ‘Go for it, and bring me no hostages, this battle is going to be won with no hostages.’ And I can tell you Patrick delivered every single time.”

Mr. Gaspard declined requests to be interviewed for this article.

Mr. Gaspard’s father moved with his wife from their native Haiti to post-liberation Zaire, when its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, appealed to French-speaking academics of African descent to teach there. Three years after Mr. Gaspard’s birth, the family moved to the Upper West Side, where they lived until Mr. Gaspard turned 11.

He fell in love with the 1973 Mets, and especially Tom Seaver. Soon the Gaspards, including his brother Michael, who currently works as a consultant for the Advance Group, moved closer to Shea Stadium, to St. Albans in Southeast Queens, from which Mr. Gaspard commuted to high school at Brooklyn Tech. 

He attended the School of Visual Arts and later Columbia, but like Mr. Rove before him, Mr. Gaspard left college early to submerge himself in politics. He interned in the office of Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins.

He got his first taste of campaign work doing advance for the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, during which time his energy and affinity with local political organizations caught the notice of Harlem-based consultant Bill Lynch, whose office floor Mr. Gaspard got in the habit of crashing on. 

Mr. Lynch later brought Mr. Gaspard on to Mr. Dinkins’ first mayoral race, and then to City Hall.

“He was smart and loyal and really knew his way around,” Mr. Dinkins recalled.

By the time Mr. Gaspard left the Dinkins administration to do consulting for unions and political campaigns, he had already cemented a lasting reputation as an organizer with extraordinary political and sartorial sense.

Councilman Bill DeBlasio, who worked with Mr. Gaspard in Mr. Lynch’s shop, remembered his friend helping him pick out a new wardrobe when he went to work as state director for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign.

“He took me to Barneys and showed me how to dress well,” said Mr. DeBlasio. In 1997, outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger enlisted Mr. Gaspard for her doomed campaign against Rudy Giuliani. Now, as the head of the American Jewish World Service charity, she still seeks his help, recently meeting with him in the White House to discuss Darfur aide programs and policy. 

“His job is to connect people,” she said.

After working on outgoing Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger’s extremely unsuccessful mayoral campaign against Rudy Giuliani in 1997, Mr. Gaspard became chief of staff to Ms. Lopez, a radical feminist from the Lower East Side who was one of the mayor’s most raucous critics.

She once declared on the floor of the City Council that Mr. Gaspard was “an honorary lesbian,” and recalled that, at times, he outdid her.

“One time we have a staff member who saw this man, and when she saw this man, she said, ‘Oh my god that man is so handsome, it’s so sad that he’s gay,’” Ms. Lopez said. “Patrick looked at her and said, ‘What did you say?’ And she said, ‘He’s gay, that is so sad. Because he is so gorgeous.’ And Patrick said to her, ‘You mean to tell me that because he is so gorgeous, he should not be gay?’ And she said, ‘Yes, it’s not useful to women!’ And he said, ‘You are the biggest homophobe I have ever met in my life, and you don’t even know it.’”

(Just this week, on June 22, Mr. Gaspard led an administration call with LGBT activists frustrated with President Obama’s incremental approach to gay rights.)

In 1999, Ms. Lopez loaned Mr. Gaspard out to help 1199 SEIU, the politically powerful labor union, to organize a march in protest of the police shooting death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Guinean immigrant. Mr. Gaspard impressed them.

“He knows what buttons to push and in what order,” said Jennifer Cunningham, who was then the union’s political director, and who went on to work closely with Mr. Gaspard for the next eight years.

George Gresham, the current president of 1199, said that Mr. Gaspard often took a “statistical” interest in candidates, just as he did to baseball box scores and farm systems, wanting to know not just their vision or why they should hold office, but how they expected to win.

“Patrick could distinguish between those who were serious and those who weren’t,” he said.

Several of his former colleagues said the most difficult time for Mr. Gaspard during that period was in 2002, when the union supported Republican Governor George Pataki over Carl McCall, then a two-term state comptroller who was attempting to become the first black governor in the history of the state.      

“All of us developed a political maturity at that time,” said Mr. Gresham. “We say we don’t have permanent friends, we have permanent interests.”

In 2003, Mr. Gaspard went national to work as the deputy national field director for the presidential campaign of Howard Dean, and after Mr. Dean was knocked out of the race, as the national field director for George Soros’ political action group America Coming Together.

In 2005, he took a leave from the union to work for another underdog Democrat, Freddy Ferrer, in a landslide loss to Michael Bloomberg. A year later, when 1199 played a major role in backing Andrew Cuomo, who had challenged Mr. McCall in the 2002 Democratic primary, in his run for Attorney general, Mr. Gaspard worked on races in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington, DC. 

He also worked on local races.

“Without Patrick Gaspard, Yvette Clarke would not be in Congress,” said Josh Isay, a consultant to Mr. Bloomberg who worked with Mr. Gaspard on that heated race, a four-way primary in 2006 for a House seat in Brooklyn vacated by Major Owens.

In that race, as in most other matters, he did his work quietly.

In December 2006, Mr. Sharpton asked Patrick Gaspard to help him assemble an emergency meeting of about 300 activists, black nationalists, union and political leaders to decide on an appropriate response to the police shooting death of Sean Bell, an unarmed young black man.

At one point, things got ugly¸ with one activist criticizing the attendance of the teacher’s union president Randi Weingarten at the meeting.

“One guy who nobody knew got up and said, ‘I don’t know why we got the head of the teachers union here, these white teachers are destroying our community,’ and went off on her,” recalled Mr. Sharpton. “And Patrick ran over to me and said, ‘I think you should call for unity and talk about how important it is that whites, blacks, everybody march together. I could say it, but I think it is better for your to say if, for the crowd, and for your own beliefs.’

“And I got up and said it,” Mr. Sharpton continued. “And as I said it, he was whispering something in Randi’s ear, and Randi got up and started talking about how committed she was and she didn’t care who didn’t appreciate her working with Reverend Sharpton. And it occurred to me that Patrick was going around the room telling everybody what to say.”

As the presidential election neared, it became increasingly clear that Mr. Gaspard’s home senator, Hillary Clinton had designs on the White House. Friends of Mr. Gaspard said that he was an early supporter of Mr. Obama, whose inclusive campaign was, as Mr. DeBlasio put it, the “clear and pure” iteration of the pan-racial “gorgeous mosaic” Dinkins campaign of 1988. Publicly, Mr. Gaspard remained neutral, but as early as January 2007, he was involved.

After unofficially helping out Mr. Obama, Mr. Gaspard met with the Illinois senator and Mr. Plouffe in Washington in February of 2007 to discuss coming aboard.

“President Obama and I met with him and really liked him, because he wasn’t your traditional political schmoozer,” Mr. Plouffe said. “There was a depth to him that we found attractive.”

(According to the New Yorker, this was the meeting during which Mr. Obama famously told Mr. Gaspard, “I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”)

As Mr. Plouffe noted, Mr. Gaspard turned them down.

But true to form, Mr. Gaspard pushed Mr. Obama’s case behind the scenes within the union, and played a critical and active role in blocking an endorsement of John Edwards before the Iowa caucus. That paved the way for SEIU to endorse Mr. Obama, and when they did, Mr. Gaspard openly expressed his support, heading to Wisconsin and eventually leading the union’s volunteer efforts in primary states like Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

He eventually joined the campaign as political director, and shared a long table in a small office in Chicago with Jen O’Malley and Jon Carson, where they’d pore over maps and manage activity in the states.

He was responsible for notifying many of the country’s leaders that Mr. Obama had selected Joe Biden as his vice president, and during the Democratic convention in Denver, he joined Mr. Plouffe and a few others in working out the exact logistics of Hillary Clinton’s campaign role and choreographing her casting of New York’s convention ballots for Mr. Obama.

During the presidential transition, influential New Yorkers had already started stepping up efforts to catch his ear.

In October of 2008, Kevin Sheekey, Michael Bloomberg’s closest political aide, wrote Gaspard asking if he could make some time for him, and they stay in touch on issues relating to the city. Lots of local officials have done the same.

“From the delegation point of view, if need be, we know we have a person,” said Representative Joseph Crowley. “We have access.”  

In May of this year, Al Sharpton went back to Washington, this time for a meeting with the president about education policy.

At one point, as Mr. Sharpton waited outside the Oval Office with Education Secretary Arnie Duncan, Mr. Gaspard stopped by to say hello.

As Mr. Sharpton tells it, he turned to Mr. Duncan and said, “You guys are real shrewd in this administration.”

He motioned to Mr. Gaspard and said, “It’s hard for me to march against you if I ever get mad, because you’ve got our best organizer.’”

They write, "In our respective roles as Mayor and leader of the nation's largest union of nurses, doctors and healthcare workers, we have worked tirelessly to improve the health care of our city residents and fellow New Yorkers."

On March 31, at an event in Washington, Rivera referred to Bloomberg as his "friend." He said, "It is my sincere hope is that we have his leadership and vision to guide us for many, many years to come.” Rivera now works for SEIU Healthcare in Washington.

At the time, a Rivera spokesperson said the comments were not an endorsement.

UPDATE: A spokeswoman for 1199 SEIU emailed to say Rivera's bond with Bloomberg has no bearing on who the union will support for mayor:

"Azi, nothing has changed since we last spoke about this. We haven't begun our formal process. No decisions have been made on the mayoral race."

[skip]

"This has nothing to do with our endorsement process."

The union’s strategy is to target Paterson’s very public allies, like Macy’s department store, Time Warner Cable, and Con Ed, which, for most Americans, are better associated with New York City rather than Albany or health care issues.

The companies are members of the Partnership for New York City, a business association that the union says is supporting Paterson on this issue.

1199 is also planning a protest outside the Macy’s in Herald Square today at noon.

1199 is also planning a protest outside the Macy’s in Herald Square today at noon.

Those ads featured workers offering testimonials in favor of the stimulus, and Canter said she was not talking about the Knickerbocker-created 1199 ads in New York that excoriated David Paterson and included a blind man asking the governor, "Why are you doing this to me?" 

For the record, the quote from Gillibrand in the story is accurate, and the New York-based union member the senator was talking to—Henry Singleton—clearly understood her comment to be a reference to the anti-Paterson ads in New York.

His response to her at the time was, "We had to do what we had to do."

“I think it’s happening already, I really do,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview on Feb. 14 as she ate a celery stick dipped in blue cheese at the end of a long day of meeting and greeting at the New York State Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators convention in Albany. “The more I am traveling around the state, the more people get to know me, the more we build this relationship of trust that I’m going to be there for them just as I was there for my district.”

To call Kirsten Gillibrand’s introductory travels around the state a “listening tour” wouldn’t quite capture it. Yes, part of the mandate since her appointment last month by David Paterson has been to hear and address complaints from officials representing high-crime urban communities (she has an NRA-approved position on gun rights) and from black and Latino officials concerned about her restrictive stance on immigration.

But she is also laying down a marker. She is telling the state that it had better get used to her.

She is a fact of life.

“For those who are considering running, they will see that I am performing well,” she said, referring unmistakably to Democratic Representatives Carolyn McCarthy and Carolyn Maloney, each of whom has made noises about running against Ms. Gillibrand in 2010.

“Ultimately,” she said, “I don’t think there will be a primary.”
While New York’s new junior senator does not lack for brute political strength—tireless campaigning, monster fund-raising, unanimous backing from the state’s top-tier establishment—she can still be a bit of a blunt instrument.

On Jan. 30 at the St. Regis Hotel, Ms. Gillibrand met with about 30 influential liberal columnists and consultants over a spread of cookies and soda for an off-the-record talk about key policy issues.

According to several attendees, Ms. Gillibrand introduced herself by saying her experience as a lawyer prepared her for Congress because she had learned to read bills closely. She then answered a series of general questions with lengthy responses.
Then Dorothy Samuels, a member of the Times editorial board, launched into a particularly aggressive, rapid-fire line of questioning about Ms. Gillibrand’s position in support of a bill lifting all gun regulations in Washington, D.C. and her support of the so-called Tiahrt Amendment, which critics say inhibits access by law enforcement officials to gun data. At one point, Ms. Samuels asked, sarcastically, if Ms. Gillibrand’s years as an associate at a law firm representing Philip Morris taught her how to read the Tiahrt Amendment before she signed on because, as Michael Bloomberg argues, it prevents the authorities from getting information to pursue gun traffickers.

“Well, that’s not how I read the amendment,” Ms. Gillbrand responded.

One attendee said that Ms. Samuels went over some line, but several other attendees considered Ms. Gillibrand’s response to have been worse: vague, naïve, dismissive. At a certain point, when Ms. Gillibrand seemed to ramble during an economic question, an aide handed her a note. She stopped in the middle of the answer and read the note, which instructed her to move on, out loud.

She moved on.

“We were kind of shocked,” said one attendee. “She was unprepared and a little minor-league that day.”

Ms. Gillibrand remembers it differently.

“My view on the D.C. gun ban, which I told her, was that you could not be a gun owner in Washington, D.C., and I didn’t think that was fair,” said Ms. Gillibrand. “Because any law-abiding citizen should be able to own a gun, particularly if they want to hunt or for home protection, and I thought that was very, very different from laws to keep the guns out of the hands of criminals.”

She added, “Dottie asked, ‘How can you say you are going to end gun violence if you say that you are going to support the brief to end the D.C. gun ban.’ And we didn’t have time because literally it was the last question and we had already been given that we were late by 10 minutes so I couldn’t go into the full discussion, with her, which I would have.’”

Asked if she considered herself to have been dismissive of Ms. Samuels, who she acknowledged she didn’t know was a member of the Times editorial board, Ms. Gillibrand responded, with a chuckle, “Not at all. I think she was dismissive of my answer.”

An editorial headlined “Listening to Ms. Gillibrand” in the following morning’s New York Times concluded: “New Yorkers should expect much more.”

Maybe New Yorkers will get it, but in unexpected areas. While the press narrative has focused on guns and immigration—the issues on which Ms. Gillibrand continues to “evolve” (to use Chuck Schumer’s word)—she shows signs of assertiveness on other topics.

Take relations with Israel, a subject on which New York’s senators have traditionally assumed leadership stature as four-square supporters of whatever elected government happens to be in power.

In the Feb. 14 interview, Ms. Gillibrand said that the next prime minister of Israel—based on the recent close election that has yet to result in the formation of a governing coalition in the Knesset—would “probably” be the Likud Party’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a hawk who regards a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as naïve and unworkable.

“You never know: as the leader, Mr. Netanyahu may find that when he works with America, he may broaden his view,” said Ms. Gillibrand. “He may decide that in the best interest of peace is a two-state solution. That may well indeed be the path to peace.”

Asked if she would advocate that position in the Senate, Ms. Gillibrand said, “I will certainly offer what I think is the best policy, regardless of what Netanyahu says is what he wants to do. I will always be an advocate for the solutions that I think will be most effective.”

And as for the United States applying diplomatic pressure on its ally, Ms. Gillibrand wasn’t entirely against the idea.

“I think the president will use all the means and all the tools in his toolbox to reach a solution for peace in the Middle East,” she said, adding, “And if he offers positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement, that will be a strategic decision for the administration and our secretary of state.”

Asked if she would generally be a standard-bearer for New York liberalism in the Senate, now that she represents the entire state, Ms. Gillibrand said, “I think we’ll see. I tend to look at each issue independently, each issue on the merits, and I rarely will decide my views based on whatever label will be given it.”

She continued, “I think on financial issues, I will have a view based on my experience, having been a securities lawyer, having come from upstate New York, where we tend to be more in favor of fiscal conservatism, pay as you go. On the financial issues, that may be areas where I might bring different views to the debate.”

On Saturday afternoon, a handful of supporters of Ms. Gillibrand, several wearing suits and mud-caked boots, came to the drab offices of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1321, just down the road from the Hudson Valley Paper Company and Miss Albany Diner.

Union officials looked for toothpicks to poke into cheese cubes and pepperoni slices and brought out a tray of cookies studded with M&Ms. One man in a work shirt and baseball cap walked into the office and said, “I haven’t seen my girl in a while.” A middle-aged couple showed off their “Senator Gillibrand” buttons while the mayor of Albany, Gerald Jennings, complained that the Web site of The Times Union had published the wrong address for the event, in which Ms. Gillibrand would endorse Democratic businessman Scott Murphy, a red-haired political neophyte, as her successor in the 20th Congressional District.

Ms. Gillibrand arrived, dressed in a funereal black jacket with large black lapel buttons, white pearls, a black skirt with a frilled hem and shiny black flats. (After a morning political event, she had paid respects to the family of one of her former staffers whose mother had died.)

“How are you? Nice to see you,” Ms. Gillibrand repeated over and over as she shook the circle of extended hands around her. “I appreciate you coming out today.”
She took a cookie from the tray.

“I’m just going to steal this cookie because I might not get another chance,” she said before heading to the press conference.

Ms. Gillibrand, who went to Dartmouth and spent years working in a white-shoe corporate law firm in Manhattan, affects a homespun air. Upstate, she talks about the lessons her grandmother, Polly Noonan, a Democratic power broker, taught her, and of the importance of family.

Standing in front of the union’s seal, festooned with American and Canadian flags, she told the 50 or so local supporters, “I am so happy to be home,” and waved a special hello to her local reporters. She talked about the stimulus bill that had just passed in the Congress; demonstrated a fluency in energy technology grants; and called dairy farmers “the best businessmen I know.” When she ceded the podium to Mr. Murphy, she stood with hands folded in front of her and squinted and grinned as if there were sun in her eyes. It’s an expression she wears often when listening onstage. It’s her answer to the Hillary head nod.

When state Democratic Party chair June O’Neill asked if there were Democrats in the house, the whole room cheered, but when she asked if there were any converted Republicans in the house, Ms. Gillibrand alone said, “Absolutely.” She whispered “perfect” to Mr. Murphy when he finished his maiden political remarks, and came to his rescue when, in a question-and–answer session, her press aide asked if a reporter’s query about drug policy was intended for “Scott Johnson.”

“Murphy,” corrected Ms. Gillibrand.

After the press conference she greeted the people in the room, including Elizabeth Benjamin, an excellent, no-nonsense Daily News reporter who had asked about guns during the press conference. 

“How ya been?” said Ms. Gillibrand said to Ms Benjamin. “I love seeing you.”

According to Ms. Gillibrand’s base, she is doing everything right.

“The first people she met with are the first people she might have had a problem with,” said Bob “Rabbit” Riley, a Congressional liaison for the National Association of Letter Carriers, referring to the new senator’s downstate constituents who disagreed with her pre-evolved positions on guns and gay marriage and immigration. “Give her a year and a half, and she’ll be untouchable.”

A few minutes later, Ms. Gillibrand hopped in the passenger seat of the black Toyota 4Runner parked in front of the union’s doors, and traveled to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, which played host to the black and Latino convention over the weekend, and which was ground zero for the people who have a problem with her.

Ms. Gillibrand’s tactic seemed to be twofold. Appeal by listening, nodding and projecting accessibility. Demonstrate power by recruiting, talking about big money and reminding people that you are the senator from New York.   

As soon as she arrived at the hotel, she took a brief private meeting in a booth of the lobby restaurant with a veteran operative she was interviewing for a potential staff position. Then, followed by four female staffers, two of them toting notepads, Ms. Gillibrand walked to the elevator bank, where Charlie King, the executive director of Al Sharpton’s national Action Network, asked her how her day was going.

“It’s been O.K.,” she said, adding, with a punch in the air, “I got to endorse somebody.”

In the cramped elevator, Gloria Davis, a former assemblywoman who resigned after pleading guilty to bribery in 2003, turned to Ms. Gillibrand and said, “I knew your grandmother. I don’t know you at all.” 

“Where are you from,” Ms. Gillibrand responded cheerily, apparently not recognizing Ms. Davis.

“The Bronx,” said the woman.

“I’m headed to the Bronx this weekend!” Ms. Gillibrand said.
Ms. Davis looked unimpressed.

“So do you have any good stories about my grandmother?” said Ms. Gillibrand as the elevator doors slid open. “I love to hear all the dirt.”

“No,” Ms. Davis responded.

Ms. Gillibrand, ever merry, persisted. With her assistant, Tippins Stone, in tow, she asked Ms. Davis for her name, which she did not recognize, and her number. Ms. Davis coldly asked for Ms. Gillibrand’s card instead.

“Tippins,” Ms. Gillibrand said, grabbing her assistant’s green notepad and scribbling down a phone number and email address.

“Don’t give this information to anybody,” she told Ms. Davis. “It’s my private information.”

Outside a reception for New York’s State Senate majority leader, Malcolm Smith, Mr. King, who was acting as the senator’s unofficial liaison, brought forth Inez Dickens, who represents Harlem in the City Council.

Ms. Gillibrand kissed her on the cheek. Ms. Dickens, wearing a waist-length black fur coat, lectured the senator on how she needed to broaden her mindset.

“When you represent one area, you represent it to the best of your ability, I understand that,” said Ms. Dickens. “But when you represent the whole state, you have got to be willing to change your views, especially on guns.”

“It’s my honor to work with the communities,” responded Ms. Gillibrand.

When she finally walked into Mr. Smith’s reception, where many guests swarmed a buffet in the center of the carpeted ballroom, she had a hard time getting much attention. Mr. Smith introduced her to lukewarm applause.

“This is the leader’s reception, and I got the senator who’s going to get us high-speed rail. You’ve got to do better than that,” he said.

Ms. Gillibrand stepped out from behind the podium, and said, “I just want to introduce myself.” She then discussed specific energy and tax proposals before concluding, “I just want to thank you for letting me introduce myself.”

As she slowly made her way out of the room, tearing off scraps of paper with her email to more people, Mr. Smith told The Observer that he was confident that people around the state would soon understand that Ms. Gillibrand wouldn’t face a primary challenge. 

“I don’t believe she gets primaried,” said Mr. Smith. “I’m going to help them realize that.”

At a Bronx Democratic Party reception down the hall, teenagers wore “Bronx Youth Empowerment Program” sweatshirts and sat around the small stage as Ms. Gillibrand said, “I’m going to be the U.S. senator from the Bronx.” She talked about money for food stamps and education in the stimulus bill, emphasized the change in her immigration position after meeting with some Bronx legislators (“end these raids until we have a comprehensive immigration reform”) and tried to connect with the “moms” in the room. She talked about the rights of veterans and relayed the appreciation a Vietnam vet expressed to her after she helped him get disability money. (“Kirsten, every morning when I strap on my leg, I strap on my patriotism.”)

The crowd needed to be hushed from speaking over her a half-dozen times.

Ms. Gillibrand’s last reception of the day was held by 1199 SEIU in another ballroom decorated with a banner on the wall that read “Health Care Cuts By Caucus Member District.”

Ms. Gillibrand and her aides, now nearing the end of that day’s marathon get-to-know-me tour, made her way to the vegetables in the corner of the room. 

“What are the big issues for 1199?” she asked Henry Singleton, a union member and organizer of home-care workers, as she ate a small plate of marinated artichoke hearts with her fingers.

She listened to him talk about hospitals and the necessity of the brutal ad campaign the union had just waged against Governor David Paterson’s budget cuts, one of which included a blind person asking Mr. Paterson, “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Your advocacy is right on,” she said, placing the remaining oily ribbons of artichoke on a cracker. “I’ve seen your commercials. You bring it down to the people. Your commercials are great.”

“I like you already,” said Mr. Singleton.