2013 Election: Predictions And Endorsements

Well, we're one day away from the Democratic primary.

It has been one long, long, long primary battle.

We have gone from Christine Quinn as the presumptive favorite to Anthony Weiner's toying with entering the race to the Anybody But Quinn folks launching anti-Quinn ads in April to Weiner jumping in the race in May to Weiner going ahead in the race in late June to beginning to look like a Quinn/Weiner runoff in July to Weiner's Sexting Scandal 2.0 that effectively ended his campaign to Quinn taking the lead again post-Weiner Sexting Scandal 2.0 to de Blasio beginning to gain traction in August to de Blasio gaining momentum by late August and now looking like the presumptive nominee one day before the primary.

The question is, can de Blasio avoid a runoff and if he can't, who will he face in that runoff?

I'm going to go with my gut here and say de Blasio narrowly misses 40% and is forced into a runoff in two weeks. 

Quinnipiac has had de Blasio over the 40% threshold, but Siena, Marist and the AM New York/Newsday poll have not.

As of my writing this post, a PPP poll was rumored to have de Blasio at 38% - also below the magic 40% threshold.

Quinnipiac famously got 2009 wrong, having Bloomberg up mid-teens in their last poll while he only beat Bill Thompson by 5 points.

So I'm a little leery of putting too much faith in Quinnipiac.

I think de Blasio gets somewhere between 36% and 39%, enough to crush his opponents, but not enough to avoid the runoff.

I think Bill Thompson will place second on Tuesday.

I think Thompson places second not because I think he's such a great candidate (frankly he has run almost as anemic a campaign this time around as he did in 2009 against Bloomberg) but because Quinn is such an awful one.

She's gotten hammered for months now over term limits, the slush fund, proximity to Bloomberg, etc. and all that negativity has taken its toll.

It's true that she won all the newspaper endorsements, but no one gives a crap about newspaper endorsements in a top-line race.

In the public advocate's race, in the comptroller's race, an endorsement from the Times might matter, especially if people do not know the candidates (obviously people know Spitzer, but the rest of the candidates in the two races are relatively unknown.)

The Times endorsement did not help Quinn in the least, nor did the tabloid endorsements.

She has some establishment figures, a few celebrities, some unions - those all help.

But her negatives are so high and the downward trajectory in all the public polls so steep that I don't think any of that helps her.

She comes in third in the race.

So it's Thompson and de Blasio in a runoff - a bad situation if you're a teacher hoping for the race to end tomorrow.

I don't want Thompson in a runoff because that gives the UFT a chance to screw up this race even more than they already have.

In my opinion, they endorsed way too early in the race.

With Weiner sucking up all the Anybody But Quinn oxygen in the race in May and June, I can see why they decided Thompson was the best candidate to endorse.

Nonetheless, it didn't take a genius to see that Weiner was still hiding something around his sexting scandal and that eventually it would come out.

I would have held off endorsing for a month, had I been the UFT brain trust, for that very reason.

I wrote in the late spring that the unions, the candidates needed to start attacking Weiner, get the newspapers to scrutinize his record, his sexting scandal, especially the communications he had with the seventeen year old back during his Sexting Scandal 1.0.

I thought a little scrutiny would bring him back to earth.

I was right - it did.

Again, didn't take a genius to see any of this.

Weiner wasn't answering questions straight when asked about the sexting scandal and while I thought the thing that would bring him down would have been something he did before he resigned Congress, I still thought something would eventually bring him down.

I was just hoping it would happen before Primary Day because as of early July the worst teacher nightmare was starting to come together - a Quinn/Weiner runoff to take on Lhota in the general.

Fortunately for us, Sexting Scandal 2.0 made it to TheDirty.com and the rest, as they say is history..

After Weiner imploded, Quinn took a "lead" in some of the public polls, but it was a "soft" lead based as much on name recognition as anything.

The ABQ vote was coming together once more after the Weiner implosion and there were only two places it could go - Thompson or de Blasio.

Thompson, running another poor campaign, tying himself in knots over stop-and-frisk, impressing nobody on the campaign trail with his "meet and greet" skills, was not that candidate.

Rather de Blasio, the one who ran the consistently "progressive" campaign, the one with the consistent stop-and-frisk critique, was that candidate.

Had the UFT waited even just a couple of weeks with their endorsement, they would have been able to make a different choice.

Now it's possible that the UFT was always going to go with Thompson.

NYC Educator and I had this conversation over email - with Randi on board his campaign and Tisch as his co-chair, it was probable they were going to go with Thompson no matter what.

Let's be honest, Mulgrew runs the UFT the way Randi wants him to run it - and that includes evaluation negotiations, contract strategy, and endorsements.

So it's probable that no matter what, the UFT was picking Thompson because Randi wanted him and whatever Randi wants in the UFT/AFT, Randi gets.

In the end, Randi is not going to get what she wants, however, because Thompson is not going to beat de Blasio in a runoff.

It's true that he's only polling down 12 to de Blasio in the Marist poll (Quinn is down 22 in a runoff to BdB), a lead that is not insurmountable, but that's only if you have a decent candidate trying to surmount the lead.

Thompson is not that candidate.

An awful candidate, an awful man, a crook, a phony and a hypocrite (see here, here and here.)

That's our Bill Thompson.

Plus Randi Weingarten and Merryl Tisch are shilling for him.

Can you think of two better reasons to not support Thompson than Weingarten and Tisch want him?

In the end, I think de Blasio beats him double digits in a runoff and that's that - on to the general.

As for the comptroller's race, I think Stringer wins a close one.

Spitzer's under 50%, he's acted increasingly desperate these past two weeks, indicating that his private polling is telling him he's in trouble, and while Spitzer has name recognition, he does not have a great GOTV effort.

Stringer, with union backing, party backing, certainly does have a good GOTV effort, and I think that will make the difference for Stringer come Tuesday.

As for endorsements, I am enthusiastically endorsing Letitia James for Public Advocate.

You can read my reasons for that endorsement here.

In the comptroller's race, I make no endorsement.

I wanted to endorse Spitzer, but his hiring of Students First shills and his touting of charter schools will not allow me to do that.

Stringer I cannot endorse.

Yes, I understand he appointed Patrick Sullivan to the PEP.

Let me tell you something about that appointment.

If that seat mattered, Stringer would not have appointed Patrick Sullivan.

If that was a vote needed by the deformers, you can bet Stringer would have been told by the powers that be that a deformer must get that seat and a deformer would have gotten that seat.

Because the mayor had all the votes he needed already on the PEP, the Stringer appointment (like the other borough president appointments) was superfluous to the deform movement and Stringer was allowed to appoint whomever he wanted.

In Patrick Sullivan, Stringer appointed a good man and an articulate defender of public schools.

But that's only because the fix was already in on the PEP.

So I cannot endorse Stringer for comptroller either.

He's a hack.

Therefore I endorse nobody.

In the mayor's race, I hold my nose and unenthusiastically endorse Bill de Blasio.

I don't trust de Blasio for a whole host of reasons.

First, his work with the real estate industry.

Second, his hiring of Reshma Saujani as deputy public advocate so he could use her Wall Street connections to fund raise for his mayoral campaign (see more about what an awful human being she is here.)

Third, his "Tale of Two Cities" campaign strategy is simply that - a campaign strategy.

He doesn't believe anything he is saying any more than any other politician (see here.)

So de Blasio is the best of a bad lot.

I know he is saying some good things around education, but as James Eterno can tell you, de Blasio can talk a good game about supporting public schools, and then you can never hear from him again.

So de Blasio is my "hold your nose, pull the lever and hope for the best" vote.

Not a ringing endorsement, I know.

But I'm too old and I've seen too much in this fake democracy we call America to believe in that kind of thing anymore.

Change We Can Believe in kinda disabused me of all of that.

Still, all things considered, we're in better shape than we thought we were going to be in July.

Back then, it was looking like Weiner/Quinn to take on Lhota.

I would prefer a straight de Blasio victory tomorrow to keep Mulgrew from making things worse with de Blasio than he already has.

But even if we get a de Blasio/Thompson runoff in two weeks, that's a helluva lot better than the Quinn/Weiner runoff we thought we might be getting back around July 4.

Most prognosticators do not make predictions in political races because it's so easy to be wrong.

But I figure, what the hell, so what if I'm wrong?

It's been a helluva campaign season, so why not go out with a bang?

Frankly, I hope I am wrong - I would love to see de Blasio get well over 40% tomorrow and send Thompson and Quinn off to their post-election Wall Street gigs right away.

In any case, let's hope for a decent election tomorrow, no problems with the machines and, God help us, nothing unforeseen happening as happened back in 2001.