Another poll, another prediction of a 2009 race with Undecided ahead of all three expected major Democratic candidates—by 30 points.

There was some movement between the Quinnipiac poll released in March and the new one released May 7. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn/Queens) and Comptroller Bill Thompson (D) have each climbed two points. Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) has dropped three. But nothing decisive: combined, the expected titans of the 2009 Democratic race still would not have enough to get past a run-off if the election were held next week, and the difference between them barely falls outside of the margin of error.

Of course, the election will not be held next week. It is early, way too early to think seriously about a primary that is 16 months away, and most voters who are thinking about politics at all have been paying attention to the more pressing and immediate race for the presidential nomination. The race has yet to take shape, the majority of voters yet to even realize there is a mayor's race next year.

“With it being so wide open, it calls out for someone to come in and lead, or for one of these existing people to step up,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Poll, which has turned up similar results as Quinnipiac about the lack of enthusiasm behind any of the Democratic candidates.

There is a feeling these days. For now, it is quiet, murmured, discussed over drinks or lunch without much seriousness or substance—but discussed nonetheless.

There must, everyone seems to agree, be someone else.

Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with Thompson, Weiner or Quinn, even with the slush fund scandal. All have distinguished themselves as skilled in politics and government, winning difficult elections and passing serious policy.

But in an open race for mayor of New York City, most agree, there should be more than just three major candidates. And there should probably be more than just these three.

“They’re not heroes and they're not really representative of any real identifiable base,” said political consultant Norman Adler. “None of them are anathema. It's just, the door's still open.”

Two potential candidates, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión (D) and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum (D), have removed themselves from the race—Carrión to run for comptroller, Gotbaum to care for her husband.

But the sparse field has to do with a number of other factors, from the general satisfaction with the direction of the city, which seems to have quelled a lot of potential political agitation, to the term limits which have reduced the time many city officials have in the public eye, to the members of the Congressional delegation enjoying their first term in the majority in a long time, which has given them precious and powerful seniority.

Ambition, tempered by political reality, may also play a part: the scuttled presidential dreams of both Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg have reminded potential candidates that being mayor of New York tends to be a dead-end job.

Still, this is an open race for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York, and without a clear, strong GOP candidate—John Catsimatidis is still making inroads with the Republican establishment and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s denials remain as strong as ever, despite him enjoying higher poll numbers than any of the Democrats—this may very well be the race which determines the next mayor of New York.

For many, that leads to one clear conclusion: there must be someone else. There is room for someone else, they say. There are bases that are not covered, huge chunks of the electorate without a candidate to instinctively call their own. Undoubtedly, another candidate will emerge. He is out there. She is out there. They are out there.

Who?

No one seems to know.

But that does not stop them from looking. Like Ahab roaming the seas or children tucking molars under their pillows, they believe, proof or not. Someone else will emerge, they insist. Someone must. They just know it.

“I would be shocked,” said political consultant George Arzt, “if the race is as it is at this point.”




There are not too many obvious options. Queens Borough President Helen Marshall (D) is seen as at the end of her political career. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (D) is expected to run for public advocate, if he runs for anything other than re-election.

There is Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz (D), who insists he is still far from a conclusion on whether to enter the mayoral race. There are a few members of the congressional delegation who might be able to put a campaign together. Besides them, there are not any elected officials with large enough constituencies to generate the name recognition and voter bases generally viewed as necessary to make a serious run for mayor—though Queens Council Member Tony Avella is already trying to upturn that thinking.

Money matters, but not as much as some might think. Thanks to the donation limits and public matching funds through the campaign finance system, all the candidates could potentially end up with the same amount of money in their bank accounts, with spending caps helping to maintain a level field. In a thickening race without a clear frontrunner, the campaign finance system could actually remove money as a major factor, at least between the top tier candidates. Raising a match-able $6 million may not be easy, but it is certainly not prohibitive.

Limits might also soften the ground for a self-financed candidate, who, even with the raised thresholds prompted by such a campaign, would need only about $15 million to outspend those within the system. In a city of 71 billionaires and countless more millionaires, finding a concerned Democrat able and willing to put up the $15 million might not be that hard.

The run-off law would help, too. The more crowded the field becomes, the less likely any candidate will score a clean 40 percent to avoid a run-off, and the fewer votes necessary for the second place finish to get into one. In the 2001 primary, for example, Fernando Ferrer got 279,000 votes to Mark Green's 243,000, but Green went on to win the run-off despite being a full 36,000 votes behind in the first round. And in that year’s seven-way public advocate primary, the second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-place finishers were all within 6,000 votes of each other. Miniscule margins like those could encourage a lot of contenders into the race.

So the question for most does not seem to be whether, in the abstract, it can be done. The question is who can do it.

To many, the answer may come down to demographics. Identity politics may often be dismissed as an antiquated approach to New York elections, but nearly every analysis and prediction of next year's race relies on the traditional splits of the Democratic electorate into racial and ethnic segments.

With Carrión's surprise December announcement of his run for comptroller, the mayoral field was left without a Latino candidate. That leaves a large number of voters up for grabs. Thompson is expected to try for this support, but a so-called black-brown coalition has eluded many New York politicians before. For Thompson or another candidate, a strong appeal to the Latino community could be an important building block for a candidacy.

Geographical holes exist as well. There is no candidate from the Bronx, again thanks to Carrión's decision to run for comptroller. Nor is there a candidate from Harlem or the Upper East Side, both areas which have produced strong mayoral candidates in the past.

The potentially exploitable ideological gaps are harder to discern, with both Thompson and Quinn yet to provide a clear agenda for their campaigns and Weiner still in the process of adapting his 2005 middle-class, outer borough appeal into a platform for 2009. But with barely any ground staked out, according to the collective wisdom, a candidate with a strong message on just about anything could easily find a spot in the field.

Whatever the gaps, Markowitz believes he could fill them. He will decide whether to run by late summer, he said, and though he is unsure about whether he wants to be mayor yet, he is confident that he would fit well in the field.

“Even if it's just the three or four of us, we're offering enough choices,” he said.

He does not expect he would get the support of either the powerful Queens or Brooklyn political organizations, but he would expect to get the support of many Brooklynites and others who have come to know him from his efforts as Kings County's biggest cheerleader. The Caribbean and West Indian communities would back him strongly as well, he predicts, as would many African-Americans. He is popular in Brooklyn, and would presumably be strong there, cutting into the bases of both Thompson and Weiner as he ran.

“The racial and geographical issues—in this race, with me in it, I don't think it would be as much as you think,” Markowitz said, sounding the rhythms of a campaign for working- and middle-class voters. “I’m the candidate of just the average person.”

Other names get mentioned. If Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-Queens/Bronx) wanted to run, most agree, he could put together a campaign. Council Member John Liu, who has millions in the bank for an as-yet-undeclared race, could try to build a candidacy on strong support within the Asian community and his home borough of Queens. Carrión could change his mind. Gotbaum could change hers. And any of the expected candidates for public advocate or comptroller could decide to jump to the mayor’s race.

But two possible candidates come up in nearly every conversation of potential candidates: Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (D).

Nadler is well known, a capable fundraiser with an existing war chest, and extremely popular in the parts of the West Side that vote in higher numbers than anywhere else in the city. He represents parts of two boroughs, and he has strong ties to the Orthodox Jewish community, which can vote in high numbers when its leaders decide to push for a chosen candidate. He has had a consistently high profile for everything from his fight for better air quality at Ground Zero to the meetings in the aftermath of the Sean Bell verdict.

Like nearly everyone in the Congressional delegation, Nadler is thought to have wanted Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. With the possibility of that vacancy growing less and less likely, though, many seem to expect he might look to City Hall instead.

For the attorney general, the thinking goes like this: Cuomo, whose ambition and political skills are both well known, would like to be governor. He might have found an opening in a Democratic primary against Eliot Spitzer in 2010. The Emperor's Club revelations put an end to that possibility.

A campaign against David Paterson would be trickier. After carefully rebuilding the bridges he burnt in his 2002 gubernatorial primary race against Carl McCall, Cuomo may be unable, or at least unwilling, to take on another black candidate popular within his party, let alone an incumbent governor.

Cuomo's options for advancement are slim. With a Democratic field lacking a towering figure, the mayor's race may provide an opening. City Hall, after all, is just a short walk from his apartment.
Candidates could also come from outside the Democratic establishment. But if they did, they would need huge name recognition, or the ability to buy some very quickly.

That leaves the businessmen or other moguls. Though some might think New Yorkers would be eager to have another MBA mayor, political consultant Hank Sheinkopf warned that with a recession and continuing Wall Street losses, the time may not be right for a captain of industry to try mounting a campaign, even in the somewhat unlikely event that one were to emerge on the Democratic side.

“By the time this year is out, 40,000 people will be out of jobs in the financial sector,” Sheinkopf said. “Not a good calling card.”

So the conversations tend to turn fantastical. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) could run, or maybe Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens). Not that either of them has expressed any interest—Smith, in fact, started signaling his support of Thompson's candidacy a year ago.

Or a celebrity could get into the race. California has had two actors as governor, sent Sonny Bono to Congress and elected Clint Eastwood mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea. New York has enough of its own celebrities in residence to make for a mayor. Or maybe a sports star. Joe Torre was once discussed with some seriousness as a possible contender, but he has decamped for Los Angeles. Or maybe Tiki Barber wants to make another career switch.

The search for the mythical mayoral candidate, like the Big Apple's own Yeti, continues.

Fernando Ferrer, for one, wishes it would stop. In his years involved in politics and his own mayoral runs, little has been more frustrating than the return with each election cycle to people talking about being dissatisfied with their choices, and about looking for someone else. The speculation that Bill Clinton would run in 2001 made him particularly apoplectic, he said, but the pattern as a whole drives him crazy.

“Come on!” he said. “It's the same question and the same answer. And amazingly, we all act like this is the first time we heard this problem.”


Or maybe, just maybe, the primary will be between Weiner, Thompson and Quinn and no one else.

Or maybe voters will turn to Avella, who is waging a proud dark horse race for the nomination on a platform of government reform.

“The reason I'm running is I looked at the top candidates and found them wanting, and figured if you want real change, you've got to get in there and do it yourself,” he said.

Those looking for better-funded campaigns, he said, will turn to the big three. But those who are looking for the better-grounded campaigns, he insists, will turn to him.

“I have yet to see a vision from any of the other candidates, other than that they want to be mayor,” he said. “For me, being mayor is the consequence of making change.”

So for those asking who the fourth candidate will be, he has a simple answer.

“I'm here,” he said.

Avella scored 4 percent in the February WNBC/Marist poll. He was not an option in the May Quinnipiac poll, which only asked opinions on Weiner, Thompson, Quinn and Gotbaum among potential mayoral contenders.

Polls out this early are based mostly on speculation, name recognition and gut feelings. Sometimes, though, they work: almost eight years ago, there were four candidates in Quinnipiac's June 2000 poll about the last open mayor’s race, and those four ultimately were the ones who made up the Democratic field. Mark Green had the highest approval ratings by several points. A year and a half later, despite a bruising run-off and a terrorist attack which shook the core of the city along the way, he still ended up with the Democratic nomination.

But those hoping for Mayor Avella, Mayor Torre, Mayor Cuomo, Mayor Nadler or just about anyone else, take heart. Not recorded as a choice in that June 2000 poll: Michael Bloomberg.