Former Congressman Anthony Weiner, who announced his highly-anticipated mayoral campaign in the wee hours of the morning today, has not managed to make up much ground in public polling since he floated his name a month ago. Indeed, his percentage in the Democratic primary–15 percent–is the exact same in today’s Quinnipiac poll as the firm’s April 19 survey. Read More
John Liu’s mayoral campaign may be hovering around ten percent in the polls, but according to the candidate himself, they understate his support by more than twofold. Indeed, a beaming Mr. Liu told a room full of teachers yesterday that if the surveys were accurate, he’d actually have the support of a quarter of the city’s Democratic primary electorate.
“My true base of support in the electorate is closer to 25 percent,” Mr. Liu, the city’s comptroller, exclaimed at a teacher’s union mayoral forum in Brooklyn. “You add on top of that the tremendous amount of labor support I’m going to have, that puts me very much in the running–much more so than other candidates who I don’t think have any piece of their base that is not being reflected in the public poll numbers.” Read More
Should he enter this year’s mayoral race, former Congressman Anthony Weiner would start at a decent position–15 percent–according to a new NBC New York-Marist poll released this evening. In the Democratic primary survey, Council Speaker Christine Quinn continues to lead the pack with 26 percent, with Comptroller John Liu, former Comptroller Bill Thompson and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio narrowly behind Mr. Weiner.
However, the key takeaway might not be the exact percentages, but rather the increased difficulty any candidate would have in reaching the 40-percent threshold to avoid a run-off with Mr. Weiner in the race. Read More
Councilman Dan Halloran, charged last week in a wide-reaching bribery scheme, often says his office has been consistently ranked number one citywide in constituent services, but it’s not completely clear where his number comes from.
Indeed, after Mr. Halloran’s chief of staff resigned yesterday, his spokesman repeated the assertion that their office was “the most responsive to constituents in the Council, closing over 8,000 cases.” At his re-election kick-off in February, Mr. Halloran himself touted their “No. 1 ranking in constituent services in the Council.” The claim was again presented by his spokesman last October and their office produced a press release celebrating the achievement in January. Read More
Earlier today, there was a rare bit of good economic news with the announcement that job creation broke out in February as the United States’ unemployment rate fell from 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent. This morning, however, Mr. Bloomberg urged the public to ignore the widely discussed unemployment number and instead look at the raw job total nationwide–a net increase of 246,000 new jobs last month.
“The unemployment number is relatively meaningless,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his weekly interview with John Gambling. “It is the number of people who have jobs–the number of jobs. I think the national economy is doing a little bit better. Not going down, it is going up a little bit better, [but] nowhere near fast enough to give jobs to a lot of the people who want them. And a lot of the people who have dropped out of the workforce [are] saying, ‘I’m never getting a job, I’m not going to even look.’ Then you don’t get counted. … That’s why the unemployment number is bad–is not really a good indicator.” Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo reached his all-time high job approval last month, with 74 percent of the state’s voters telling Quinnipiac University that they approve of the governor’s performance and only 13 percent taking the opposing position. As Mr. Cuomo himself predicted yesterday, however, his support dropped after he quickly pushed the passage of a new gun policy package earlier this month. He now stands at a still-respectable 59 – 28 approval rating.
In a Quinnipiac survey released this morning, Republicans appear to be a key factor in Mr. Cuomo’s doubling disapproval number, likely due to the controversial gun control issue. Indeed, while only 34 percent of New Yorkers said the new legislation went “too far,” 59 percent of the state’s Republicans begged to differ. Mr. Cuomo’s GOP approval fell from an astounding 68 – 18 percent on December 12–just two days before the Newtown massacre–to 44 – 43 today. Read More
Embattled Congressman Todd Akin’s campaign manager (and son) Perry Akin released a statement saying a new Rasmussen Reports poll showing that the elder Mr. Akin went from leading the Missouri Senate race to running 10 points behind his rival, incumbent Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill after his controversial comments on “legitimate rape” is actually bad news for Ms. McCaskill. The younger Mr. Akin’s rationale for this interpretation of the poll numbers is that Ms. McCaskill should be beating Mr. Akin by a lot more than 48 percent to 38 percent in the aftermath of his rape-remark firestorm.
“The fact that Claire McCaskill is only polling at 48% after 72 hours of constant negative attacks on Todd Akin shows just how weak she is. If she can’t break fifty percent after a week like this, Democrats should ask Claire to step down,” the Akin campaign’s statement said. Read More
The race between veteran Congressman Charlie Rangel and State Senator Adriano Espaillat for the 13th Congressional District in Upper Manhattan will come down to paper ballots. Mr. Rangel was initially declared the winner by the Associated Press based on initial results provided by the New York City Board of Elections, but it was subsequently revealed those results did not include votes from many of the precincts in the district. After a re-examination of the votes, the BOE released unofficial results tonight including votes cast in all of the district’s 506 precincts that show Mr. Rangel defeating Mr. Espaillat by a margin of just 802 votes. According to the BOE, Mr. Rangel received 18,075 votes, or 44.29 percent of the total cast, compared to Mr. Espaillat’s 17,273, 42.33 percent of the votes cast.
These unofficial results do not include paper ballots cast by absentee voters and affidavit ballots submitted by those whose name is not on the voter rolls when they arrive at the polling place. Those paper ballots, which include votes for both candidates, will be counted by the BOE next Thursday and will be the deciding factor in this tight race. Read More
Supporters of State Senator Adriano Espaillat are calling for a federal monitor to step in and oversee the counting of votes in his congressional race against longtime Congressman Charlie Rangel after reports of uncounted votes emerged yesterday. Mr. Rangel was initially declared the victor by the Associated Press and in unofficial totals from the Board of Elections after the election on Tuesday, but the AP subsequently published a report claiming results from 33 of the 506 precincts in the Upper Manhattan district remained uncounted. Mr. Espaillat’s supporters announced their push for a federal monitor at a press conference in front of Mr. Rangel’s office in Harlem where some of the attendees also made allegations of voter fraud at the polls Tuesday.
“I’m here today to call for a federal monitor on the Board of Elections. It is unacceptable that 48 hours after the elections took place….we don’t have the outcome of this election,” said Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, a close ally of Mr. Espaillat’s. “We also have a lot of concerns that still the Board of Elections has not received [results from] a number of election districts. We don’t know where they are, they don’t know where they are.” Read More
The Queens Chronicle published an interview with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and his top spokesman Paul Browne in which Mr. Browne described the notion many reporters were arrested at the police raid on the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park as “a total myth.” In his story about the interview, Chronicle Editor in Chief Peter C. Mastrosimone wrote that Mr. Browne claimed “only one journalist was arrested during the operation,” but the NYPD told us there were actually two arrests of credentialed reporters during the raid.
“The information that I have here–there were two individuals that were arrested in Zuccotti Park, which was Julie Walker and Patrick Hedlund, they were credentialed individuals,” said Sergeant Ryan with the NYPD’s office of the deputy commissioner for public information. Read More
Affordable Housing or Lack Thereof
