Auspicious Poll Results for Ferrer
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Among likely Democratic primary voters, the front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, is currently the choice of just about two in five who named a favorite candidate, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll whose results were released yesterday.
If he breaks the 40% mark, Mr. Ferrer wins the nomination. If he doesn’t, he faces a runoff election with the second-place finisher in the four-candidate September 13 race. And the Quinnipiac poll found that the race for second is currently a dead heat.
In the new poll, the former Bronx borough president, Fernando Ferrer, has consistently been in first place. Quinnipiac found that 33% of the likely Democratic voters named him, while both the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller, and the Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, had 17%, and Rep. Anthony Weiner had 16%. The rest were undecided.
“None of the Democrats has a very strong base of support,” the polling institute’s director, Maurice Carroll, said. “Half of the voters for any candidate might change their mind, and a big chunk say they will vote for Mayor Bloomberg if their candidate is not the Democratic nominee.”
As the Democrats failed to pick up steam for another month, Mr. Bloomberg’s popularity continued to soar.
Registered voters gave Mr. Bloomberg a 64% approval rating. That’s just one point shy of his all-time high, in a February 2002 poll, taken just one month after he took office. Only 26% of New Yorkers in the latest poll said they did not approve of the mayor’s performance in office.
By contrast, 32% of likely voters gave Mr. Ferrer a favorable rating and 23% gave him an unfavorable rating. Mr. Miller had a 21% approval rating, Ms. Fields had a 23% approval rating, and Mr. Weiner had a 24% approval rating.
The poll, conducted between August 9 and 15, was completed before this week’s debate among the Democratic candidates. Quinnipiac surveyed 1,601 New York City registered voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for the overall sample, and somewhat wider for the subgroup of likely Democratic primary voters.
