But Harry Enten at The Guardian writes the following:
New York City mayoral primaries have a tendency to break late. This is especially the case when all the candidates are relatively close together. Today's polling isn't necessarily predictive of tomorrow's.
Quinn's polling numbers have collapsed. Her favorability ratings are in the toilet. Enten says the best way Weiner wins the runoff is if he faces Quinn. If either Thompson or de Blasio can break through and make the runoff, Weiner faces a fight.
The question is, can either Thompson ir de Blasio make the runoff against Weiner?
Enten again:
Thompson likely has the best chance. I believe that surveys are underestimating Thompson's share of the black vote (he is the only African-American candidate). I still think that's the case, but any underestimation effect would not be so great as to change the current ordering of the top line in either the Marist or the Quinnipiac polls, which have him at least 7pt behind Quinn. He'll need to get closer than he is currently to count on any survey under-count effect putting him over the top.
Thompson dropped from 16 pts back to 11 pts in the latest Quinnipiac, but remember that the poll undercounted his support in 2009, so it may be undercounting it now.
Also, while I know that Weiner is garnering some support from the black community in the latest polls, remember how Weiner got elected to his first office by sending out racist mailers.
You can bet the unions backing Thompson are not going to let that fact go when they start running ads against Weiner, even if Thompson himself decides to let it go.
Let's see what Weiner's support in the black community looks like after a couple of weeks of Weiner's A Racist ads.
I would say that things are certainly not looking good if you're a teacher looking for somebody other than Weiner/Quinn/Lhota to be the next head of the school system.
But these primaries do break late in NYC and I think the best news out of the latest Quinnipiac poll is just how far Quinn has fallen in the voters' estimation:
Quinn's net favorable rating among Democrats is only +5pt. This is an amazing 50pt drop since January. It's also a 16pt decline from just late June.
People really don't like Quinn and they like her a lot less now than they did just seven months ago.
While that alone may not put either Thompson or de Blasio in the runoff with Weiner, it certainly doesn't hurt.
I remember leaving comments on this blog from the time of the Lhota announcement that that was the ed deformer game plan all along as they couldn't trust anyone even Quinn as well as a Republican. Enter D'Amato and Tisch to support Thompson as an unwitting stalking horse - like he was sort of in 2009 when he ran an awful campaign, basically assuming he couldn't win. In fact I think if people had a clue he would get so close more of them would have turned out for Bloomberg. So I never took the closeness seriously. If the UFT had endorsed that would have spurred more Bloomberg support. One must wonder if the Weiner entry was really just him. Things have gone too smoothly for him and as pointed out over the past few days he has his wife who apparently has the Clinton blessing now on this. So something is going on behind the scenes. Yes that racist letter may come back to haunt him but so far it has not been a big issue and time is getting short. Maybe the September surprise? I think Quinn has stabilized and will not drop further.
ReplyDeleteI still maintain Lhota has a hard time getting elected because he's such a miserable SOB. If it starts to look like he's got a shot, he's going to get some press scrutiny and I dunno if he'll stand up to that. Remember, just last year he challenged a 77 year old man to a fist fight after he attacked the man's character at an MTA meeting. This is a guy who has ferret moments all the time. I don't think he can manage to get elected mayor of NYC without having one of those. But we'll see...
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