Latest Mayoral Poll Numbers

Quinn at 37%, de Blasio at 14%, Thompson at 11% and Liu at 9%.

Quinn need only get 40% to avoid a runoff.

Look for the powers that be to try and move the primary to June from September to keep anybody from catching her (or at least gaining enough support to keep her under 40%.)

The NY Times and others have called for the primary to be moved up - something that would be really, really funky considering this is an election year and favors the candidate with the most name recognition and money.

Like Quinn.

Thompson, meanwhile, has not a chance in hell of getting elected mayor, but as Michael Fiorillo pointed out in an earlier comment, he is there to take away support from Liu and de Blasio and help Quinn win.

As Michael put it:

As in 2009, he is the Potemkin candidate, falsely appearing to be real candidate, but actually serving the needs of the city's power elite by misdirecting voters.

I think that's exactly right.

Ironically the Potemkin candidate almost bumbled into City Hall back in 2009, such was the unpopularity of Bloomberg and his maneuver to overturn term limits so that he (and only he) could win a third term to be mayor.

Thompson, so inept at running a campaign that he wasn't even polling the race, didn't know that he was 4% or so points away from Bloomberg in the closing weeks.

If Thompson had any shame, he's have crawled off after the ineptitude of the '09 campaign and joined the rest of the political corpses on NY1's Wise Guys panel.

But Thompson has no shame and so he is now out to once again ensure another four years of Bloomberg, albeit this time in the form of Christine "Little Bloomie" Quinn.

The ways the numbers look now, she is awfully close to getting over the 40% threshold and giving us another four years of Bloomberg.

Now that de Basio is much better than her, but he is better.

And Liu, as I have pointed out before, has been destroyed by the trumped out campaign finance fraud case against his bundler.

Liu was the one guy that actually scared the powers that be so they destroyed him.

Quinn they can live with, de Blasio they can work with and Thompson they control.

And of course Lhota they would love, but he ain't happening:

By margins of up to 3-1, voters back any of the leading Democrats over Lhota:

• Quinn leads 63 - 19 percent;
• de Blasio is up 58 - 18 percent.
• Thompson is ahead 55 - 20 percent;
• Liu leads 53 - 22 percent. 

So it goes...