New York News Blog

Hang on a second.

Five points?

A week ago Quinnipiac had Bloomberg up 18 points. Yesterday they had him up 12 points.

If the polls were anywhere near right, and the shift in their numbers reflected the rate of Thompson's gain, he should have lost by about 10 points.

What happened?...

While we slog through our local races here in sleepy Gotham, the NY-23 Congressional election remains hilarious. Last weekend Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava "suspended" her campaign, in which she had come under merciless assault by supporters of Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman and was trailing badly, and threw her support to Democrat Bill Owens.

Polling since then has been understandably mixed ands suspicious. Siena's late poll, taken the day Scozzafava endorsed Owens, showed Hoffman up five points on his remaining challenger, with eight percent still hanging in for the withdrawn Republican and a fat 18 percent undecided. Polls trumpeted by conservatives have Hoffman leading by as much as 17 points.

This has led to a more excitable scene on the ground than usual in the upstate district. Talking Points Memo reports police called on "rowdy Hoffman-backers" at a polling site in St. Lawrence County. Yesterday a protester outside Joe Biden's Owens rally in Watertown told Dave Weigel, "I'm more on the violence side... you kick them in the ass and be done with it." (The man also posited that a black Hoffman worker was "with ACORN")...

​Here it is, folks, all 1,990 pages of it -- the House of Representatives' Health Care Bill, which was unloaded today by Nancy Pelosi. It is said to be "very similar" to the Senate version now working, which may speed reconciliation sufficiently that we may have a finished product by the time President Palin has taken the oath of office. We'll read it when the Large-Type Edition comes out, but conservatives have already manned the barricades: "The bill contains the word 'shall' 3,425 times," reveals Matt Lewis. And we all know what the future tense/indicative mode means: socialism!

So the Mayor is all like "you sucked when you ran the schools" and the Comptroller is all like "you're a D-minus mayor."

This tears it for "Harlem resident Tim Fielder" who is so not leaning toward Thompson anymore, and so totally voting for Bloomberg because the D-minus remark was "not very magnanimous." Oh snap! In fact, four of the five "undecided" "Democrats" the Post impanels say the Mayor's stellar performance has convinced them to vote Bloomberg. This is the break the campaign has been looking for!

NYT: "Mr. Thompson, the Democrat, needed a knockout -- and he did not get it." That's such a nice sentence that we suspect the Times began working on it a few days earlier. The Times also faults Thompson for not making more of the Obama endorsement (which weak nod the paper had previously mocked as "unusually lukewarm") and of his Caribbean roots.

Doomed, we tell you.

Last week a Research 2000 poll showed Democrat Bill Owens leading in that contentious NY-23 Congressional race, holding 35 points with Republican Dede Scozzafava at 30 and insurgent Conservative Party candidate Bill Hoffman, backed by Sarah Palin and other prominent rightwingers, at 23 percent. Today the Club for Growth, a conservative group that's strongly backing Hoffman, announces that its poll shows Hoffman in the lead with 31.3 percent, Owens with 27 percent and Scozzafava with 19.7 percent...

By Aaron Howell.

​ Followers of the Times' City Room blog may have seen that the United Nations has dispatched Raquel Rolnik (pictured), its Special Rapporteur for housing issues, to America. She'll visit various U.S. cities on her trip, including Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans.

Right now she's in New York. Runnin' Scared caught up with her as she toured The Bronx, where tenants and organizers prepped her on what they described as the newest phenomena of housing woes, "predatory equity."

At an hour-long presentation at the Sedgwick Branch Library on University Avenue and 176th Street -- a futuristic 90's building that looks part space shuttle and part Star Wars, -- the rapportuer was told that in a four-square-mile area of the North and South Bronx, six private equity firms have officially driven 2,738 apartment units into foreclosure or risk of foreclosure.

The election is a week from tomorrow, and the final vote-discouraging polls are rolling in. Today Quinnipiac shows Mike Bloomberg up 53 to 3r percent among likely voters -- pretty much what the Marist Poll showed last week. The only question, says Quinnipiac's polling director: "Will voters see those big Bloomberg numbers and decide they don't need to vote, or will the Mayor's well-oiled machine get them to the polls to run up the score?" We're on the edge of our seats. Nate Silver, who called the 2008 Presidential results so well, puts Bill Thompson's chances at 35 to 1, though he allows as how Thompson could take The Bronx.

Adding insult to injury, the Thompson campaign has been ticketed 1,677 times and fined about $126,000 for putting up posters on city property.

Mayor Bloomberg says that when he praised opponent Bill Thompson's record as comptroller, he was just being "polite." And, like Senator Seabright Cooley in Advise and Consent, he can afford to be charitable. The latest Marist Poll shows him up 16 points on Thompson among likely voters. The new numbers are Bloomberg 52, Thompson 36 -- last time Marist polled, in September, Bloomberg had the same 52 points, but Thompson had 43.

Where did Thompson lose seven points? In September "Other" had less than one percent, and "Undecided" had five. The don't-knows remained steady in October, but "Other" has swollen to seven percent.

Maybe Marist should start asking people about Reverend Billy, Green Party candidate, or the other balloted candidates for Mayor. At least then Thompson would know who to pander to...

A new poll of "likely voters" shows Jon Corzine maintaining his 3-point lead over Chris Christie for the governorship of New Jersey. Whereas the previous poll gave Corzine a 40-37 edge on Christie, in today's Rutgers-Eagleton tally each of them lost a point, presumably to third-party challenger Chris Daggett, who jumped from 14 percent to 20. Five percent of respondents were undecided.

Corzine's leading though 69 percent of respondents that New Jersey is "going in the wrong direction," 41 percent say that as Governor Corzine is doing a poor job, 52 percent give him an unfavorable rating, and 88 percent say they're following the election either very or fairly closely...

Remember, during the Albany Coup, how the state senate Democrats locked the chamber and Pedro Espada flourished the key? National Democrats are starting to pick up this method, thanks to our own Edolphus Towns. The Hill says the Brooklyn Congressman "locked Republicans out of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee room to keep them from meeting when Democrats aren't present."

Republican Congressman Darrell Issa had been pressing for subpoenas to investigate Countrywide Mortgage, which has powerful Democratic friends. The Democrats had taken to boycotting the official meetings in the chamber and holding their own elsewhere, and a Republcan staffer made a puckish video of that, shown above. So Towns changed the locks, he told Politico, "because [the Republicans] don't know how to behave."

Republicans, who previously had their own key to the hearing room, now have to get the Dems to let them in when they want to use it.