With Weiner in the race, Quinn's formidable early lead is diminished, keeping her well below the 40 percent she'd need to avoid a run-off with whomever comes in second.
The graph shows a steady chipping away of Quinn's lead, perhaps accelerated by the emergence of Weiner, who appears to have a steady base of support. The other non-Quinn candidates haven't seen their standing changed much in the head-to-head matchup.
So, a run-off seems likely, but there's reason to doubt whether Weiner will be among the top two.
He has 15 percent of the primary vote so far, but he's the best known candidate in the race, giving him the least amount of potential to grow his support. Weiner only leads the lesser-known challengers to Quinn by five points among Democratic voters, and that's with nearly 100 percent name recognition.
As I noted last month, when Quinnpiac released similar poll results: "Everyone knows Anthony Weiner, and that's his problem."
Paybarah goes on to look at the trajectory of favorability/unfavorability ratings in the past few polls and notes that de Blasio and Thompson have the most growth potential and the lowest negatives while Weiner's negatives are very high, Quinn's have gotten larger over time and Liu suffers from high negatives as well.
Sure, if the election were held today, the runoff would be between Quinn and Weiner.
But there is a lot of time between now and September and both Thompson and de Blasio have growth potential while Weiner is definitely coming close to his ceiling of support already.
If Quinn continues to lose support and Weiner stays around 15% or under, it will be interesting to see who makes the runoff.
It's not out of the realm of possibility that Quinn, Weiner or both could miss the runoff entirely.
Really, we have a wide open race.
Given that some pundits and Quinn supporters were making like she had this all sewn up back in February when she was at 37%, I think those of us in the ABQ camp can be happy with where the race stands right now.
Very informative post, I suspect the recent endorsements DeBlasio received from labor have to do with the working families party. Gotham Schools posted that Weingarten assures Thompson of the UFT vote or maybe not. Hmmm, looks wide open and ABQ cannot relax as the Quinn folks will put on a full court press. Weiner will be toast by Sept 1.
ReplyDeleteI wrote that I thought the UFT would endorse Thompson a while back. But with little movement in the polls, we'll have to see. They want to pick a winner more than anything. And right now, there is no clear front runner anymore - not with Quinn dropping so far so fast. Thompson is mired at 10% with de Blasio. I bet they're waiting a bit to see some movement in the polls before they announce. But I still think they go with Thompson. As always, hope to be wrong! Hope they go with de Blasio...
Delete