This isn’t terribly surprising if you’ve been watching the New York City Mayor’s race. But NBC/WSJ just released a poll showing that former Rep. Anthony Weiner, the butt of so many jokes from the NY/DC media set is now the frontrunner in the race, having displaced Christine Quinn, who for most of the last year has carried a Hillary/2008 mantle of inevitability.
The numbers are …
Weiner 25%
Quinn 20%
Thompson 13%
de Blasio 10%
Liu 8%
The poll also shows that Weiner has made substantial progress moving the numbers among those New Yorkers who would consider voting for him in the general. Two months ago only 40% said they’d consider voting for him in the general. Now that number is 49%. On the flip side, the ‘no way, dude’ number has fallen from 52% to 45%. Those numbers are likely more favorable that they suggest because the GOP is hardly fielding any serious candidates this year.
Now, as I said early on, Weiner is a much more formidable candidate than most people seemed to think. But just as big if not a bigger story is Quinn’s collapse. I believe she’s fallen in support in basically every successive poll since the race started getting regularly sounded earlier this year. Quinn had worked with Bloomberg in countless ways (I know, she’s my member of the City Council) to engineer her own succession to the mayoralty. But it all seems to have come apart in the face of widespread outbreak of what might be termed voters not liking her and being turned off by her efforts to get the gig with backroom deals.
