A new poll of how candidates vying to fun for New York City Mayor are doing in their Democratic primary battle shows New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio in the lead and former Rep. Anthony Weiner virtual political history:
New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio leads the Democratic primary field for the city’s 2013 mayoral elections, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday.
Among likely Democratic voters, de Blasio took 30 percent of the vote, followed by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at 24 percent, former comptroller Bill Thompson at 22 percent, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) at 10 percent, comptroller John Liu at 6 percent and former council member Sal Albanese at 1 percent. Another 7 percent was undecided.
De Blasio also held the lead in three potential runoff scenarios, beating Quinn by 54 percent to 38 percent, Thompson by 50 percent to 40 percent, and Weiner by a whopping 72 percent to 22 percent.
But voters’ choices are hardly set in stone: 34 percent, including 37 percent who backed de Blasio, said there was a good chance they’d change their minds.
While there was little evidence of a gender gap among voters, there was a “measurable racial divide,” according to the poll. Thompson led among black voters, with 39 percent, followed by de Blasio and Quinn. Among white voters, de Blasio led with 39 percent, followed by Quinn and then Thompson.
De Blasio’s 30 percent is the greatest share of the vote any candidate has attracted so far in polling on the race. In the weeks since Weiner’s numbers dropped after new revelations of his inappropriate behavior, most surveys have shown Quinn leading the field, although generally with support in the mid-20s, far below the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.
As Weiner withers, you can be political journalists are already writing his political obituary. All they have to do is to add the lede on election night. It’l be a major story because it looked like he was poised to make a comeback until a)there were new revelations that he had “sexted” after he had insisted he stopped b)his behavior it he final days looked more like a meltdown than a serious campaign.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.