For Votes, a Common Appeal to the Struggling Residents in the City In search of Democratic mayoral primary voters, I took a humid hike on Monday up the precipitous streets and stairways of Highbridge in the Bronx. A working-class aerie perched above the Harlem River, the neighborhood embraces native-born and immigrant New Yorkers by the thousands. I ran into Pablo Rivera, a 49-year-old Dominican immigrant who was hustling home. He has worked for an Acura franchise in Manhattan for 18 years. He's a union man with benefits; his American dream sounds as if it's in working order, except that it's not. His income, like that of most Bronx residents, is a car sliding backward. "Management is bringing in contract workers; they cut us back to four days a week, and no overtime," he says. I went from $700, $800 a week to maybe $415 a week. Does that leave him enough to take in movies? A dinner with friends? His eyebrows wig-waggle; I must be kidding, right? I just want to pay the rent and pay for clothes and books for my 14-year-old son. I'm thinking of going back to driving a taxi. The Bronx, with about 1.4 million residents, is the city in a microcosm, only in more pain. From 1989 to 2011, inflation-adjusted median income here dropped 23 percent. Of the city's five boroughs during those years, only Manhattan, sustained by financial-sector helium, had income climb - by 8 percent. But here, after a fashion, is the good news: Whatever their hyperventilations and gone-weak-in-the-knee moments, the mayoral candidates have focused more intently on Pablo Rivera's city, which is to say the majority, hard-working and too often tumbling-backward New York, than in any election in recent memory. Bill de Blasio has led the way, and for this he deserves credit. But Comptroller John C. Liu has thumped at this theme no less insistently. Christine C. Quinn talks of being a tenant mayor, stanching the decline in rent-stabilized units and building more affordable housing. William C. Thompson Jr. talks of pulling more into the middle class, and tempering the upheavals and statistical obsessions that marked public education under Michael R. Bloomberg. It's too easy to dismiss these candidates as uninspired. An essay on Monday in this newspaper compared this election unfavorably with the 1969 campaign of the novelist Norman Mailer and the columnist Jimmy Breslin. I recall as a kid digging their anarchistic provocations, but that campaign was a hip wail wrapped inside a joke. Mayor Edward I. Koch, now treated as of blessed memory, could claim real accomplishments. He also could be cruel in lancing the unfortunate. Rudolph W. Giuliani, New York's own Vlad the Impaler, had his inspired moments, like his insistence that crime could be tamed. Then there were the days he called a news conference to announce he was leaving his wife or starting a campaign to extend his term after the Sept. 11 attacks. Mike Bloomberg of 2001 was a dull speaker who wore an air of entitlement like a favorite fur coat. He became a pretty good mayor but he never lost that coat. The candidates make a show of disemboweling one another. Mr. de Blasio, in a recent e-mail, is called "deBliar." Clever, sort of, not really. The bitterness obscures the fact that not much separates them. It is Ms. Quinn's fate to be lashed forever for her turnaround on term limits. Her turn, as detailed by The New York Times on Monday, was craven - when Mr. Bloomberg went to her and laid out his plan, she had nothing to say. Mr. de Blasio makes great sport of this. Once upon a time, however, he was no less eager to overturn term limits. He favored accomplishing this not via voter referendum but with a predictable City Council vote. After overturning term limits, Mr. Quinn and the mayor stood for and won re-election. Detest their cynicism. As a coup d"état this was weak tea. Mr. de Blasio can claim leadership pulling back on stop-and-frisk measures, and Mr. Thompson, notwithstanding his actorly histrionics of late, can fairly be described as a latecomer. The candidates differ little now. It's worth noting that Mr. de Blasio, Ms. Quinn and Mr. Thompson acknowledge that even a tightly constrained stop-and-frisk program will result in mostly black and Latino young men being stopped, for the simple reason that violent crime is committed overwhelmingly in communities of color. Ms. Quinn did herself no favors by resisting for so long the progressive attempt to extend a few sick days to working-class New Yorkers. Mr. Thompson for many months favored sick days, in principle, until he testified before the City Council and came out in favor of the legislation - if it was delayed for a year after passage. Equivocation is perhaps not as synonymous with principle as Mr. Thompson might imagine. Mr. de Blasio could be more Machiavelli than Eugene Debs. Ms. Quinn could be Tip O'Neill, or a machine hack. All that is certain is the candidates will stumble out of this campaign having thought a lot about the other New York. The University Neighborhood Housing Program wrote a fine report: "Nowhere to Go, a Crisis of Affordability in the Bronx." It advised policy makers: Always think of the Bronx. Mr. Rivera offered a turn on that advice, before walking uphill to his home: "They need to remember their promises to us." E-mail: powellm@nytimes.com Twitter: @powellnyt