First, she is losing support:
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn leads the Democratic primary for mayor with 32 percent, compared to 37 percent in a February 27 Quinnipiac University poll and her lowest number in five months. Results for other Democratic contenders are:
14 percent for Public Advocate Bill de Blasio;
13 percent for former City Comptroller William Thompson;
7 percent for City Comptroller John Liu.
The other candidates are not picking up support, but Quinn is losing it.
Previous to this poll, she had gained support in the past five Quinnipiac polls, dating back to May of last year (from 26% to 37%.)
This is the first time she has lost support in almost a year.
The poll was taken between April 3 and April 8, so some of this loss may be due to the barrage of negative stories and ads she has taken over the past couple of weeks (the NY Times story about her temperament; the Halloran scandal; the Time Warner ad.)
At any rate, this is why Quinn is trying to get Time Warner Cable to stop running the "Quinn Is A Crook" ad bought by an independent consortium of former Quinn supporters.
Quinn knows she is vulnerable to the corruption charge.
Which is the second piece of bad news from the Quinnipiac poll:
New York City government corruption is a “very serious” problem, 40 percent of voters say, while another 42 percent say it is “somewhat serious,” according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Findings are similar across party, gender, race, age and income lines.
...
“Those news pictures of politicians in handcuffs clearly struck a nerve. Nor did it fail to impress New Yorkers that, although some of the bad stuff occurred in Albany, it was city people who were accused,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute
People have been paying attention to the corruption scandals and arrests.
It cannot help Quinn that Halloran was planning to use money from his Christine Quinn-approved City Council slush fund for a bribe even as the "Quinn Is A Crook" ad started to run on Time Warner Cable.
She's already dropped five percentage points since the last poll.
Let's see where she drops after a few more weeks of these kinds of ads.
I have long said that Christine Quinn is a paper tiger frontrunner, that she has name recognition and therefore leads in the polls, but that if she faces a significant challenge in the primary, she will fold.
A 5 percentage point drop from the previous poll isn't exactly a fold, but it's early.
And the negative ads are running earlier than usual this year.
Her trajectory had been up for the last year.
But that trajectory direction, at least for now, has changed.
For Quinn to have dropped 5 points in this poll is very significant. This pollsteris not to be believed as the 09 mayoral results have shown. This pollster always favors the incumbent especially the Bloomberg preference which in the Dem primary is Quinn. I also do not believe that none of the other candiates picked up any support. ABQ.
ReplyDeleteI agree - five points in the Q poll, which seems to often veer toward incumbents, is bigger than five points in some other poll.
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