NY Governor's Race Gets Down and Dirty As Polls Keep Rolling In

New York's gubernatorial race appears to be the race to beat as far as sheer nastiness is concerned. Not only are both Andrew Cuomo and Carl Paladino willing to sling the mud and barbs at each other both directly and through their surrogates, but even former Governor Eliot Spitzer had to chime in about Cuomo.

Spitzer probably can't bear to watch the New York race, because it's one that was his for the taking until a prostitution scandal sent him packing from the governor's mansion. Cuomo was his nemesis in the primary race, but Spitzer ultimately won that race.

This time, Spitzer gets to sit back and throw barbs at Cuomo, even though Spitzer was no patsy when it came to throwing mud or his weight around Albany. If anyone knows how to be a dirty and nasty politician (and that's not counting his ethical and legal woes), Spitzer knows from personal experience.

Then there's the issue of polling, where a slew of polls were released this week and the results raised a few eyebrows. The polling on the race isn't quite all over the place as one would think. For starters, each of the polls was constructed differently - likely versus registered voters, and whether they included Rick Lazio or not.

A Quinnipiac poll found that Paladino was within 6 points of Cuomo among likely voters, but that's looking to be more of an outlier than any of the other polls that came in this week. That includes a Marist poll that has Cuomo up by 19 among likely voters, and Rassmussen has Cuomo up by 33 points among registered voters. Likely voters is a better gauge of outcomes, but the polling all seems to point to a significant Cuomo edge. From Marist:

“Andrew Cuomo is ahead, and right now, this is not a close race,” says Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, Director of The Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “He is being bolstered by the Lazio factor, but he is just above 50% among likely voters, and you can’t overlook the enthusiasm Republicans are bringing to this election cycle.”

Regionally, Cuomo runs best in New York City followed by the New York City suburbs. In the Big Apple, 65% of likely voters say they plan to vote for Cuomo while 23% report they will cast their ballot for Paladino. Lazio receives the support of just 6%. Moving to the suburbs, Cuomo garners a majority of likely voters in this region — 52% — while Paladino and Lazio net 30% and 16%, respectively. Upstate, Cuomo and Paladino receive the same support. Both Cuomo and Paladino take 43% of likely upstate voters. Just 7% of likely upstate voters say they will cast their ballot for Lazio. 7% are also unsure.

Cuomo has to get Democrats energized, which is a tall order in the current political climate. Still, registered Democrats significantly outnumber Republicans in New York, which means that Paladino has to hold on to the Republican base and take a strong majority of independents. Further, Paladino has to do more than hold his own against Cuomo upstate.

Paladino is attempting to run as an outsider and is channeling a whole lot of anger and vitrol. He's angry with the legislature, especially Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. He's angry with the governor and the sclerotic nature of the political process.

What he hasn't said is how he would actually fix things. He hasn't talked about what he would do to clean up the corruption in Albany. Other than demonizing Cuomo, Paladino hasn't actually said why he'd be better for the state than Cuomo.

More to the point, in the early ads run in the campaign by Paladino, Paladino has gone on the attack - but hasn't run positive ads. Cuomo has done both. He's run both attack ads on Paladino and uplifting ads about how Cuomo would bring change to Albany. Cuomo is at least attempting to channel the anger about the mess in Albany for positive ends. Whether he's successful remains to be seen.

Mixed Messages In New York Primary Results

What kind of message did voters send based on last night's election returns?

Mixed messages - and it totally depends on the race we're talking about.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY15) won reelecting pretty handily despite being up on ethics charges that could get him booted from the House. His constituents didn't seem to mind, and it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that the primary was the only chance to unseat him. What does that say about his constituents in Harlem? They don't care about his criminality and illegal acts - including evading paying taxes in multiple jurisdictions and to the IRS?

At the same time, the nutter Carl Paladino handily beat the GOP preferred Rick Lazio. Neither of these guys are world beaters and Paladino is a nut job whose racist and bigoted comments surely reflect his true mindset and views on the diverse population found throughout the state. He has money to burn, and that surely helped him beat Lazio. Paladino seems to have touched a nerve of discontent, but it will not be sufficient to beat Cuomo in November.

Paladino really doesn't have a chance at beating Andy Cuomo in November, but he might make it interesting with tons of money to devote to his campaign. What the primary showed is that the GOP is particularly weak in NYS - something I've been noting for years and that the GOP establishment has few candidates to run for statewide offices except retreads - Lazio was last seen running as a replacement for Rudy when Rudy withdrew from the US Senate race against Hillary Clinton following his prostate cancer diagnosis. Before that, he was pretty much a nobody - and will again return to obscurity.

Other local races of note here indicate that some voters finally got tired of criminal behavior - sending Hiram Monserrate (who was now running for Assembly after being tossed this summer from the State Senate) and Pedro Espada Jr. packing. Those two loathsome Democrats launched a coup last year to hand power back to the GOP for a few months so that they could push their own agenda and enlarge their own political fortunes, but fortune turned quite cold real fast - and both are really thugs in nice clothes.

Can we draw a larger conclusion?

I think the real story is that voters are fickle - and that predicting the outcome in November is going to be a tall order. The Delaware outcome may have made a GOP takeover in the Senate more difficult because the candidate chosen, O'Donnell is less electable than Castle. That's a slim bit of good news for Democrats on an otherwise difficult election season.

NYS GOP Makes Its Choice

New York Republicans have made their choice for their gubernatorial candidate. It will be Rick Lazio.

Rick Lazio was picked at the convention over Dem turned GOPer (and still registered Dem) Steve Levy. Tea Party hack-crackpot Carl Paladino was a distant third, garnering 8% of votes (nearly all from Erie County). A latecomer to the party, Myers Mermel, a real estate consultant, got 4%.

Lazio was selected on the second round of balloting after no candidate got the required 50% on the first ballot.

Paladino still figures to make this interesting by forcing primary races in September by petitioning to get on ballots around NYS.

Of course, the GOP candidate, who ever it was, faces an uphill battle against Andrew Cuomo, who is more than likely going to be the next governor of New York.

The only one who can possibly beat Cuomo is Cuomo himself if he makes unforced errors - which he's done in the past. Cuomo's done well thus far because he's been pretty quiet (for him). He's let others do the talking and the foot-insertion has been kept to a minimum.

Cuomo is a smart guy, but has a tendency to annoy the wrong people, which has gotten him into trouble before.

Still, I don't think Lazio or Levy or anyone else the GOP puts up has much of a chance in NYS. Cuomo has the name recognition and is seen as a guy who might be able to clean things up in Albany (of course, the same was said about Spitzer before his fall).

The New York Political Roundup

Jay Z and Floyd Flake have dropped out of the AEG bid for a casino at Aqueduct race track. The odds that this particular plan will go forward are getting longer with each passing day. It's not without a sense of irony that the state budget was counting on that plan being approved to help balance the budget.

That there's no deal means that the state isn't getting a much needed infusion of funds.

Meanwhile, Governor David Paterson continues to deal with the swirling accusations of wrongdoing and that he may have used a state aircraft for personal campaigning rather than for state purposes. Paterson might not face charges in tampering with the domestic abuse case because the Attorney General's office hasn't found sufficient evidence to proceed. Sherr-una Booker has apparently told investigators she didn't think that Paterson threatened her. So it was just a coincidence that after the call that she failed to appear in court for the domestic abuse case against Paterson's top aide? Still, the appearance of the phone contact with the alleged victim smacks of being tampering. The lies and obfuscation over that contact also fall in to the realm of obstruction of justice.

The NY Times reports that his father, Basil Paterson, is besides himself with the way things have gone down. His father helped select David to be Eliot Spitzer's running mate, and while he was Spitzer's fourth choice, it was a fateful decision that put him in charge when Spitzer succumbed to a scandal of his own and resigned in disgrace. There are also reports that Spitzer might be eying a political comeback.

In another Spitzer-era scandal, David Loglisci entered a guilty plea on securities fraud and allocuted to helping steer pension money to political contributors to then State Comptroller Alan Hevesi and to companies that paid kickbacks to Hank Morris, his political consultant. Can you say culture of corruption? I know you can - but so did Loglisci in saying that Morris had to sign off on deals before senior officials within the Comptroller's office would do so.

Meanwhile, a Buffalo-area Tea Party activist, Carl Paladino, is threatening to run on the GOP line and bypass the state GOP convention, claiming that the state GOP has already settled on Rick Lazio. The state GOP says in response that they welcome challenges and calls for fiscal responsibility but to run through the party channels - to make his case to the county chairs. Paladino is a real estate developer, but he's a political unknown.

Meanwhile, Steve Levy, a Democrat is courting GOP support for a possible run in the general election (as a way to sidestep what is likely an inevitable Cuomo nomination on the Democrat line).

I think Paladino is putting the screws to the state GOP precisely because Levy is contemplating a run on the GOP line to avoid a Democratic party primary - that Levy would be a true RINO-style candidate.

That said, none of the candidates in the ring thus far ignite the passions, and the only one who has statewide experience is the one guy who isn't in the ring - Cuomo.

At the same time, the most important issue facing state politicians is the budget, and Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch announced a plan to help bring the state into fiscal balance, but it involves serious borrowing and accounting tricks that are just as likely to blow up in everyone's face as the current situation. Instead of curbing spending that remains out of control, we're looking at ways to sustain the state budget at its current rate. 

More news items from around the state, including that Doug Hoffman who ran a failed campaign in NY-23, is actually moving into the district, can be found here. I guess we'll expect to see another run for that office in November.

UPDATE:
It's official. The Aqueduct casino bid by AEG was tossed out because it couldn't pass regulatory muster. That means that the $300 million that the state was hoping to get to help balance their books isn't coming either.

The state will have to relet the contract and will likely attempt an expedited contract process to see which casino group will win.

The AEG bid was marred by all manner of problem and multiple investigations opened into how it won the bid. Gov. Paterson had recused himself from that process.

The New Albany Landscape - Courtesy of Obama

This wasn't entirely unexpected, but the way in which Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was elevated to Democratic party leader in New York is breathtaking. Governor David Paterson has been bizarrely ineffective and downright awful since taking over for Democrat Eliot Spitzer who resigned after being named in a prostitution scandal with call girl Ashley Dupre.

Over the weekend, President Obama pretty much destroyed Paterson's chances at running for reelection, and cleared the way for Cuomo to take over the top job. Obama sees the numbers, and knows that Paterson is chum in the water for someone like Rudy Giuliani, and probably even Rick Lazio (who previously ran an unsuccessful campaign against Hillary Clinton for the US Senate - after Giuliani withdrew upon acknowledging that he had prostate cancer). Obama's stance destroys any remaining claim by Paterson that this is about race. It was never about race when Paterson started spouting his nonsense when the media started circling around Paterson's inability to govern, but this shows that Paterson is truly on the outs with the party bigwigs.

Cuomo is a completely different story. He's effective and capable, and has burnished his credentials as the attorney general - though we should see what he does with the ACORN investigation.

Albany politics is an absolute mess, and it's interesting that Obama is so concerned about the gubernatorial race this early. It shows that he's keenly sensitive to the fact that if the Republicans get their act together in the New York metro region, they could affect the Democrats' chances in 2010 and 2012 nationwide. New Jersey is already leaning towards kicking Obama's pal Jon Corzine to the curb, and if New York also goes GOP, that's a big hit to Democrats chances.