As you saw, Anthony Weiner dropped like a stone in the latest Quinnipiac poll. He fell from a 1st place 26% to a 4th place 16%. But I wanted to flag what I think is the more interesting detail in the poll.
Public Advocate (that’s an office here not a label) Bill de Blasio moved into second place after trailing enough that many didn’t really see him as being in the race. To be precise, he’s basically in a tie – de Blasio 21, former Comptroller Bill Thompson 20. Still that’s a signifiant move – 6 pts from the previous Q poll. The 10 Weiner lost appears to have split evenly between Quinn and de Blasio, with Thompson holding still. That may suggest, as Hunter Walker notes, that further erosion in Weiner’s support, could make it a two person race between Quinn and de Blasio. But in such a free for all it’s almost impossible to predict whose support will go to who.
de Blasio, I think it’s fair to say, is the real progressive in the race (though in national terms these folks are all really liberal.) If he manages to come in second, he’s in the run-off and I figure he can probably beat Christine Quinn who will probably come in first. And if he wins the run-off, he’ll almost certainly become Mayor since the Republicans this year can’t find anybody not embarrassing to run. Other candidates might be fine. But it’s only with de Blasio that you start to get a race with potentially national implications.
As a side note, despite picking up some of his support, Weiner’s fall is also bad news for Quinn since he is the only one I think she could reliably beat in a run-off.
I’ll try to write a bit more soon about my sense of the substance of this race.
