OMG, Anthony Weiner is now the NYC mayoral front runner!

Oh no, he's back! (Sorry, no penis pictures available.)

by Ken

Howie will have quite a lot to say about the Supreme Court ruling in the morning, and I'm happy to give the subject a pass. I'd probably just fulminate, and probably calumniate -- the Five Supreme Lunks, that is. (Howie's going to have some point-by-point on them too.)

Instead I thought I'd retreat into the political weirdosphere. From our local online news emporium DNAinfo.com this evening:

Latest Poll Shows Weiner Leading Democratic Mayoral Pack

By Jeanmarie Evelly on June 25, 2013 7:01pm

NEW YORK CITY -- A new poll shows Anthony Weiner leading the race for New York City's Democratic mayoral nominee, according to reports published Tuesday.

A Wall Street Journal-NBC New York-Marist survey of registered Democrats showed the ex-Congressman capturing 25 percent of votes, the Wall Street Journal reported -- edging out longtime frontrunner Christine Quinn, who scored 20 percent of votes.

The results show Weiner has surged in popularity since the last Marist poll in May, when he scored 19 percent of Democratic votes compared to Quinn's 24 percent.

Both Weiner and City Council Speaker Quinn remained largely ahead of their other Democratic rivals, according to the poll, which put former Comptroller Bill Thompson in third with 13 percent of votes, followed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio at 10 percent and city Comptroller John Liu at eight percent.

According to NBC New York, Weiner also polled slightly better among women: 22 percent of Democrats surveyed said they would vote for him compared to 21 percent who opted for Quinn.

Among registered Republicans, the new poll found former MTA chair Joe Lhota leading the race with 28 percent of votes, compared to rivals John Catsimatidis at 21 percent and George McDonald who scored 10 percent.

Just a couple of weeks ago, from the opposite coast Howie was asking me about the mayoral situation, and in particular whether Anthony Weiner really had a chance. AW had only had to enter the Democratic mayoral field to soar to second place behind the front runner, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. I said I thought he might if Quinn's support faded, and Howie seemed surprised to hear that I thought that possible. I tried to explain that I didn't see any of the candidates having especially solid support, and that no, I didn't imagine much of anybody voting for Quinn because she's a lesbian. A lot of us would be fine with that but don't see it as any reason to support her.

Or much of anyone else, either. It's not that the candidates are necessarily bad people -- though again, I was surprised to learn from Howie that Public Advocaate Bill De Blasio is supposed to be the "progressive" candidate. I suppose it's possible and I just didn't know it. After all, no one knows anything about the public advocate, least of all what he does. I suspect that the public advocate himself doesn't have much idea.

(You say who or what TF is the public advocate? This is actually an interesting question. Okay, maybe not an interesting question, but a question anyways. If you really want to know, I'd be happy to walk you through it, but let me warn you that you're going to have wrap your head around the death of the Board of Estimate, meaning that you'll have to find out what the hell the immensely powerful Board of Estimate was. You still want to know?)

So why not Weiner? At least people know who he is. You might think that that would work against him, but in a field where people don't have strong impressions of most of the candidates, maybe just being known gives you some stature.

The problem Christine Quinn has is that when your support isn't deep to begin with, and your the front runner mostly because people are used to seeing you near the mayor all the time, and kind of assume you're next, it's not easy to withstand having all the other candidates hacking away at you all the time -- the one issue all the other candidates can agree on.

I tried to explain to Howie that all the candidates are searching for an issue that will, well, make people care who they are. You might think, for example, that former City Comptroller Bill Thompson might have some cred considering how close he came to upsetting Mayor Mike in the last election. In all likelihood the only thing that stood between him and victory was the universal assumption that he didn't have a prayer. That turns out to have been Mayor Mike's baseline strategy: spend so much money that everyone would assume that nobody who ran against him had a prayer. Unfortunately for Bill T, that all seems like it happened in another lifetime. Now it's pretty much Bill Who?

One thing it didn't occur to me to say to Howie is that Mayor Mike seems to have kind of sucked the oxygen out of New York City's political life. Which is strange for a city that once had a candidate for one office or another on every street corner, all getting attention of some sort. It's going to be a strange readjustment when we don't have Mayor Mike to tell us what we think anymore.

Bear in mind that if no candidate gets 40 percent of the vote, there has to be a runoff. (This all goes back to 1969 and the primary victory of a not very funny clown of a man named Mario Procaccino with 32.8 percent of the vote. We can go into that too if you like, but trust me, you'd probably rather hear about the Board of Estimate.) The big news is that it looks like we're going to have our old manual-lever voting machines back for the primary and the runoff. Exciting!

The way I crunch the numbers, by the time we get to a runoff (which will be either September 24 or October 1, depending on whether the state legislature ever got around to pushing the date back -- apparently I wasn't paying close attention), the likely turnout should be in the hundreds. If Weiner can't cash in his celebrity at voting levels like that, well, then . . . um, I guess he won't win.

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