By many accounts, the 2005 election is Mayor Bloomberg’s to lose. The incumbent Republican enjoys a sizable lead over the strongest Democratic candidate, Fernando Ferrer, in most public opinion polls. His approval ratings are at an all-time high. He can cite marked improvements in test scores when defending his record on the issue that, according to surveys, matters most to city voters: education. And the billionaire mayor has nearly unlimited resources for crushing whichever Democrat emerges victorious from the September 13 primary. But in New York politics, anything is possible. Democrats enjoy a five-to-one advantage among the city’s electorate, and tribal loyalties carry great weight in a town where ethnic minorities constitute a majority of voters. And Mr. Bloomberg could yet make a fatal mistake. With only 56 days left until the primary, which of these contenders will prevail is anyone’s guess. Two of our campaign reporters, Jill Gardiner and Meghan Clyne, look at the candidates’ recipes for primary-day success.

FRONT-RUNNER FERRER SEEKS TO AVOID MISTAKES AND RELY ON HIS BASE

Democratic mayoral front-runner Fernando Ferrer has desperately tried to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2001, particularly the overt identity politics that turned his primary-day victory into a racially charged runoff defeat at the hands of Mark Green.

Yet if Mr. Ferrer — a Bronx native of Puerto Rican descent who would be the city’s first Hispanic mayor — has made strides this year in casting himself as a candidate for all New Yorkers, his 2005 victory strategy may be as reliant on race as it was four years ago.

“They’re going to have ethnic solidarity,” a veteran city political consultant, Hank Sheinkopf, said of the Ferrer camp. Their strategy, he added, would probably rely on a skilled voter-turnout organization bringing blacks and Hispanics to the polls September 13.

“He doesn’t have to be a genius,” Mr. Sheinkopf said.”In the primary, Freddy gets 90% of the Hispanic vote for showing up,” he added.

So while Mr. Ferrer’s Democratic rivals will be going all-out over the next two months — accosting voters at subway stops, religiously attending mayoral forums, attempting to wax innovative with policy pronouncements, and, in mid- to late-August, blitzing the airwaves — to build expansive coalitions of support, it’s a process Mr. Ferrer can approach with relative unconcern.

“I think Freddy has to keep to his base,” another prominent political analyst, George Arzt, said, noting that a high turnout among Mr. Ferrer’s demographic would not only clinch the primary but could stave off a runoff contest. “He can expand after winning the primary,” Mr. Arzt said.

Such caution, a professor of public administration at Columbia University, Steven Cohen, said, was probably wise on Mr. Ferrer’s part.

“I think that the one effort we all heard about for him to try to expand his base — when he spoke to those police sergeants — didn’t work out for him,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to Mr. Ferrer’s now-infamous comments about the police shooting of Amadou Diallo. The remarks, delivered before the Sergeants Benevolent Association, were perceived by many as an attempt by Mr. Ferrer to distance himself from his 1999 activism on the issue — undertaken with racially divisive figures such as the Reverend Alford Sharpton — in order to make inroads with white voters.

Signs indicate Mr. Ferrer may be heeding the consultants’ advice, and that he is confident of having his base locked in. According to campaign-finance filings, for example, Mr. Ferrer is the only candidate not to have sent out mailings to try to increase his support and visibility citywide.

And while other Democrats have maintained grueling public schedules and high public profiles in an effort to do something, anything, to grab attention and break from the pack, Mr.Ferrer is often faulted for being an absentee candidate: limiting appearances to avoid more gaffes like the Diallo episode and a ridiculed proposal to levy a $1 billion stock-transfer tax on Wall Street.

Ferrer allies, however, dispute allegations of complacency and a Rose Garden strategy. Given the length of the campaign season and the need to husband both financial resources — of which Mr. Ferrer has collected $3.8 million so far — and energy, Mr. Ferrer’s level of activity at this point is appropriate, a member of the City Council who has endorsed the candidate, William de Blasio, a Democrat of Brooklyn, said.

“The rhythm of any campaign is that you really have to get relatively close to the election for people to start paying attention,” the council member, who also worked in the two mayoral campaigns of David Dinkins, said. As such, Mr. de Blasio said, New Yorkers can expect Mr. Ferrer to ratchet up his campaign activity in the coming weeks.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more in terms of drawing contrast in terms of issues with the mayor,” Mr. de Blasio said. Those issues, Mr. Sheinkopf said, are likely to be ones popular with Mr. Ferrer’s demographic: affordable housing and education.

“It will be all education, all the time,” Mr. Sheinkopf said. “That’s something people can identify with in the communities he’s talking about — Hispanics, blacks.” In the second policy proposal of his campaign, Mr. Ferrer last week pledged to spend the $23 billion ordered paid to the city in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit on reducing the city’s dropout rate and providing a laptop computer to every city high school student.

In the days since, the campaign has continued to squeeze the issue, rolling out a series of press conferences and releases faulting the mayor for a “dropout crisis” in the city and calling on Mr. Bloomberg to track dropouts, emphasizing that the problem disproportionately affects black and Hispanic students.

But if sniping at the mayor on education can get Mr. Ferrer the Democratic nod, it underlines just how steep is the uphill climb he faces in the general election. Despite Mr. Ferrer’s denunciations, test scores in city schools have improved markedly under Mr. Bloomberg, and allies of the mayor responded to Mr. Ferrer’s proposal last week with statistics showing that measures implemented by his administration in 2003 actually precipitated a 4% decrease in the city’s dropout rate.

“I said months ago that he was an empty suit,” Edward Koch, a Democrat and former mayor who has endorsed Mr. Bloomberg, said of Mr. Ferrer. The candidate, Mr. Koch added, was “now fighting over a worthless nomination.”

“My advice is, ‘Everybody, get your concession speeches ready,’ ” Mr. Koch said. “And make them magnanimous.”

MILLER FOCUSED ON INSTITUTIONAL ENDORSEMENT INSTEAD OF VOTERS

Now that the budget is done, the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, has all but stopped going to his City Hall office and has shifted into full hand-shaking, seniors center–visiting campaign mode.

Mr. Miller, one of four Democrats running for mayor, has consistently ranked at the bottom of the polls but has raised more money and racked up more endorsements than any of his opponents in the campaign for the nomination.

And while many political observers have counted him out, assuming that Fernando Ferrer and C.Virginia Fields will be left to battle for the nomination, Mr. Miller’s inner campaign circle is working under the assumption that with the right mix of down-home retail politicking and a large television advertising buy, he will surge before the September 13 primary.

“The strategy has been simple,” Mr. Miller’s campaign manager, Brian Hardwick, said. “He set out to put together the most resources early, which he did, and to build the broadest coalition of support.”

“In the coming 60 days,” he said,”the goal is to leverage that support and those resources into a large, neighborhood-based, grassroots organization.”

Unlike his Democratic opponents, the speaker, who is a white Protestant, has no natural ethnic base of support. A resident of the Upper East Side, he must vie with the borough president, Ms.Fields, for Manhattan votes. And he faces the historical reality that no one running for mayor from the speaker’s office has ever won.

Still, his strategy — at least for the summer campaign, in which Mayor Bloomberg will be mentioned a lot but is actually a distant opponent — has been to capitalize on the legislation he helped pass and the relationships he cultivated as speaker to drum up endorsements, raise money, and recruit volunteers.

“As the no. 2 public official elected in city government, he’s had an opportunity to do a lot of favors,” a consultant, Norman Adler, said. “A lot of people are now returning those favors. It’s one of the unspoken deals in government that people understand that they are obliged to return favors.”

Mr. Miller has, for example, added at least $37,000 to his war chest from lobbyists and companies vying for a city contract to provide new bus shelters, public toilets, and newsstands.

And the largest gay and lesbian group in the city, the Empire State Pride Agenda, is backing him, citing a bill he pushed that requires city contractors to provide live-in partners with benefits. The group’s executive director, Alan Van Capelle, said during a phone interview that it has never before endorsed a candidate in a primary, but that Mr. Miller has done more for the gay community than any other speaker.

If the Miller campaign has aggressively courted endorsements and has cultivated political clubs to claim widespread institutional support, that backing has not yet trickled down to voters, the polls suggest.

Several elected officials who have endorsed him, but did not want to be named, said they were skeptical about the speaker’s chances. Others who are more optimistic talked about forcing a runoff.

“Gifford Miller has a challenge, he’s working day and night to beat that challenge,” Assemblyman Vito Lopez of Brooklyn said during a phone interview. “There have been people who have been 10 or 15 points behind and they have pulled out elections. … I think he has a possibility — not to win on September 13, but to get into a runoff.”

“The key is for him is to come in second,” the assemblyman said.

Mr. Lopez said that at a meeting last Monday night the speaker’s political backers were briefed on the status of the campaign. Mr. Lopez said many of those in attendance encouraged the campaign to set aside money for neighborhood outreach, such as letter-writing campaigns. The assemblyman said the campaign would focus on “a large media buy and a grassroots campaign.”

Mr. Hardwick would not comment on when the campaign would start television advertising, or whether Mr. Miller had taped any commercials. “Decisions regarding our television buy go to the heart of our strategy,” the campaign manager said. He said the Miller campaign did have the “resources to buy television ads in a large capacity to complement the campaign’s ground game.” He also noted that Mr. Miller’s “sweat equity” — his disciplined commitment to daily campaigning — has helped.

Because Mr. Miller has already raised the $4.5 million and qualified for the matching funds that will bring his bank account up to the $5.7 million limit, he is the only Democratic candidate raising money already for a possible runoff and general election.

He has also announced that he will begin collecting signatures for a general election party line called Smaller Class Size. The move allows his campaign to spend money on the initiative now but does not cut into the spending cap.

Mr. Miller has spent nearly $38,000 on private polling and more than $100,000 on his high-profile consultant Mandy Grunwald, who was an adviser to both President and Senator Clinton. He has paid other consultants and staff handsomely, including several who have worked on presidential campaigns last year and in 2000.

Several high-ranking Democrats have expressed frustration with the malaise and lack of inspiration among this year’s crop of Democratic mayoral candidates. Mr. Miller has tried to brush off the naysaying. He told reporters at an event last week at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn that he has defied political expectations before — when he was first elected to the council in 1996, at 26, and six years later when he was chosen as speaker.

FIELDS CAMPAIGN NEEDS FUND-RAISING BASE AND LACKS A DEFINING ISSUE

Just three months ago, the Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, was surging in the public opinion polls and had won an endorsement from one of the city’s most influential black leaders, Rep. Charles Rangel.

Now, however, her campaign is struggling to regain its footing after an embarrassing doctored photograph scandal, the firing of its top campaign adviser, a string of bad press, and a fund-raising operation lagging behind all of its rivals.

With $1.6 million in contributions and more than $1.3 million spent, Ms. Fields has raised less money and burned through her cash at a faster clip than the three other candidates running in the Democratic primary.

Political analysts have said it could be difficult for Ms. Fields, the only black candidate and woman in the race, to make up for lost fund-raising ground and to overcome her campaign’s internal troubles. Her campaign spokeswoman, Kirsten Powers, said the campaign will have “enough money to do what we need to do.”

Yet if Ms. Fields doesn’t increase her existing pool of “matchable money,” she could be short of the cash she needs to launch an aggressive television advertising campaign and to send out direct mail in the weeks leading up to the primary. Though campaign officials were tight-lipped about their strategy, there is no doubt the Fields camp will have to come up with new, innovative techniques for reaching voters if the funds don’t materialize.

Political analysts said the fund-raising woes could be compounded by the fact the borough president has not articulated a discernable vision of how she would change things in the city if she won.

“The Fields campaign right now, and this is less true of the other major campaigns, does not have a defining issue,” a political science professor at Baruch College, David Birdsell, said.

“As a result, what’s left is the candidate,”he said. “To a certain extent, this is a classic New York identity political campaign. Whether that will be enough to force a runoff, we don’t know right now. If the electorate votes down racially and ethnically divided lines, she has a shot.”

Ms. Fields, who was raised in Birmingham, Ala., during segregation and made her first push into advocacy during the civil rights movement, where she marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has made plenty of appearances with black leaders and used her upbringing as a selling point in her campaign material.

Most political consultants agree that she will need a high turnout from black voters to hold the Democratic front-runner, Fernando Ferrer, below 40% of the vote in the primary and force a runoff.

“I think her strategy has been to hope and trust that she’ll have an affinity with African-American voters and to make a pitch to Latino voters in Manhattan, particularly to wean Dominican voters in Washington Heights from Freddy Ferrer,” the director of the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York, John Mollenkopf, said.

Assemblyman Keith Wright, a Democrat who represents northern Manhattan — and is running to replace Ms. Fields as borough president, said he was confident she would surge ahead and pointed out that she has consistently placed second in the polls.

“I’ve known this woman for over 20 years,” Mr. Wright said. “We have walked the streets together, we have campaigned together.You don’t underestimate this woman. She gets it done.”

Ms. Fields has also donated money from her campaign to local and national women’s groups and tapped them as another natural constituency.

So far, that has paid off to some degree. While her opponents are getting more support from men than women, Ms. Fields’s numbers are reversed. The keynote speaker at her first major fundraiser was Jeanne Shaheen, the former governor of New Hampshire and national chairwoman of Senator Kerry’s presidential campaign.

“Virginia is herself a trained strategist,” Mr. Wright said. “I can guarantee there’s a strategy, whether they are sharing it or not is another thing. It’s like being in a football huddle. You don’t want to tell the other side what your plan is.”

IRREPRESSIBLE WEINER HAS YET TO MAKE A DENT ON THE ELECTORATE

For the past few months, Rep. Anthony Weiner has made the trek from New York to Washington and back again several times a week. Yet despite the lengthy commute, the congressman is arguably the most active of the four Democratic contenders in the mayoral race.

Mr. Weiner storms the hustings at a breakneck pace, cramming his schedule with public appearances that range from morning hand-shaking sessions with straphangers to nighttime fund-raisers with modeling moguls. In between, he votes on important bills at the Capitol.

And as Mr. Weiner scurries between cities and boroughs, his campaign has presented the congressman as the “ideas candidate,” often cranking out policy proposals faster than voters can digest them.

Observers have quietly wondered whether Mr. Weiner, who consistently ties with Gifford Miller for last place in public opinion polls, can keep up the pace through September. But the Weiner campaign promises even more action, especially in August, during Congress’s recess.

All of Mr. Weiner’s efforts, political analysts say, are focused on one goal: presenting the congressman as the candidate of the outer boroughs and the middle class. To do that, they say, Mr. Weiner is running a campaign that is heavy on policy and modeled in part on the most popular elements of the Giuliani mayoralty.

Mr. Weiner, considered the most conservative of the four Democrats, is heading into September encouraging self-reliance and upward mobility rather than big-government programs and identity politics. The results aren’t in, but Mr. Weiner says his approach is working.

“You know, when I talk about my middle-class tax cut in African-American churches in, say, southeast Queens, they have the same head nod that I get when I talk about it on the north shore of Staten Island,” Mr. Weiner said in an interview with The New York Sun. “We cannot keep running these campaigns that are cobbling together coalitions of people that are based not on common interests necessarily, but are based on race or demographics.”

One of those common interests central to Mr. Weiner’s campaign is security, an issue on which he runs to the right of his fellow Democrats.

The congressman says he endorses the “Broken Windows” theory of urban policing that influenced Mayor Giuliani, and has pledged to take it to the next level. In particular, Mr. Weiner wants to crack down on so-called “gateway” crimes, such as graffiti, that beget more serious infractions.

Mr. Weiner is also trying to cast himself as the counter-terrorism candidate. Within hours of the jihadist bombing of London’s public-transportation system, the Weiner campaign announced a six-point plan for securing New York City’s subways. On Sunday, Mr.Weiner joined with the Zionist Organization of America to demand that the Arab Bank be expelled from New York because of alleged ties to Islamist terrorism.

The event represents another component of Mr. Weiner’s outer-borough appeal: his attention to religious New Yorkers.

Mr. Weiner, who is Jewish, has long presented himself as a friend to Israel and strong on issues of importance to the city’s Jewish community, such as taking the United Nations to task for alleged anti-Semitism at Turtle Bay. He also criticized the mayor for a lack of “moral leadership” when the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens announced in February that it was shutting down 26 parochial schools, and he has promised to work with New York’s Catholic parents to prevent more closings.

A veteran political consultant in the city, Hank Sheinkopf, said Mr. Weiner was sounding the right notes going into September. “Weiner is white Catholics and Jews in the outer boroughs,” Mr. Sheinkopf said. Come primary day, Mr. Weiner will likely do well among those groups in Staten Island, Mr. Sheinkopf said, adding that if the congressman hopes to make it to a runoff, he must also perform well in his home districts of Brooklyn and Queens. And although the Bronx will probably go to the former borough president, Fernando Ferrer, Mr.Weiner may be able to pick up some votes in more conservative areas like Riverdale, Mr. Sheinkopf said.

Manhattan may be more problematic. In the course of establishing himself as the candidate of the outer boroughs, Mr. Weiner’s campaign rhetoric has frequently been unkind to New York County.

A city consultant who worked for Mr. Koch’s 1977 campaign, Jerry Skurnik, said that at this juncture, Mr. Weiner would have to rely on compelling advertising to escape his poll-number doldrums. Mr. Koch, Mr. Skurnik said, was able to distinguish himself from a crowded Democratic field largely because he took to the airwaves first. “I would tell him not to panic,” Mr. Skurnik said. “There’s still time.”