Wilmington Mayor’s Race — Undecided Leads the Pack

The News Journal released the results of their poll last night, which shows the race being much closer than the common wisdom (including mine) would have suggested. Here’s the numbers:

Kevin Kelly                18%
Mike Purzycki           14%
Dennis Williams      13%
Theo Gregory             11%
Eugene Young             9%
Norm Griffiths            8%
Robert Marshall         2%
Maria Cabrera             2%
Undecided                   21%

The margin of error on this poll is 5.8 and reached landlines only.  This surveyed likely Democratic voters. This polly also asked about registration and primary practices — where we find that this group of likely Democratic voters think that it should be easier to switch parties to vote and that primaries should be open.

So what does this say? You could say that it is anyone’s race. Except for Cabrera and Marshall. With the top tier within the margin of error, you can look at this and know that candidates have reached out and gathered up their base support. And like the NCCo race poll from yesterday, there are a good number of people who are undecided or not yet paying attention.

You could also look at this from Wilmington’s typical elections playbook, whose operating theory is about turning out the greatest number of your friends and relatives:

• Where there’s more than one white person running, they will split that vote and not be able to capitalize on motivated and reliable white voters to win.  Kelly and Purzycki are splitting the white vote (while Purzycki is likely getting the majority of the switched GOP votes.  Makes sense since he is pretty clearly GOP stalking horse in this Democratic primary.)  Kelley, by virtue of his very deep ties in the community is outperforming Purzycki with African American voters.  Kelly still has the benefit of the Buyer’s Remorse vote.  Purzycki will be unlikely to match that, no matter how much he pays Norman Oliver.  Both will need to expand their base.
• Whoever can win Districts 1 and 2 wins the City.  This is where Williams and Gregory are really fighting it out.  They are clearly going to split this territory and both will need to expand their base.  This is where Williams won it last go round and he has clearly lost support in this area.  Williams is the incumbent, so being firmly in the middle of this pack with less support than his anemic winning number from 2012 suggests to me that he may have hit his ceiling.  Gregory’s base is here too — which is the flaw in his “not waiting his turn”.  Both will have to get out of their comfort zones to eat into the undecided number.  68% of the polled group think that the city s going in the wrong direction and that is not a good sign for the incumbent Mayor or City Council President.  I’ll add that Griffiths’ base is here too, and while I think that he has an excellent shot at getting votes from other parts of the city, I can’t detect much energy from his campaign to get there.

Eugene Young is not playing by this playbook — he didn’t start with a base of voters who’ve know him for years (or a base of voters handed to him by the Castles).  So he has been building this base one door at a time since September.  With a huge team of volunteers and good fundraising, this is a campaign that started with nothing (except a commitment to bypass the rules and the waiting your turn) and is now clearly in the mix in this tight race.  Right now, he’s in the best position to expand on his numbers, largely because that is what is campaign is organized to do — build a winning coalition rather than turn out your partisans.   One of the consequences of not playing by the Wilmington rulebook is that the Wilmington establishment has been pushing back hard.  Even so, the Wilmington establishment hasn’t been able coalesce and bring any order to this primary field, which should be the signal in how much this establishment is invested in their own interests — not the interests of Wilmington.

One data point that was interesting to me was that with 21% undecided, all of those polled are pretty committed to voting in this primary.  (Notwithstanding the NJ reporting that provides space to people who won’t)  That’s evidence of coalition opportunity for the campaign that can get that work done.

I don’t know what Cabrera or Marshall will do.  Frankly, I think that this poll makes it pretty clear that they should clear the field.  Neither is in a position to win this thing and neither are they in a kingmaker position.  Cabrera has to choose to not run as an incumbent for Wilmington City Council in order to definitively lose the Wilmington Mayor’s race.  Marshall stayed out of the 2012 Mayor’s race (one he declared for) largely because of a poll he commissioned that indicated that both he and Montgomery were pretty far back in the field.  This one shows him further back so he must be in this thing for other reasons.  Again, reasons that have nothing to do with the interests of the City.

So while no candidate is sitting pretty in this poll, I think that Young’s campaign is the one best poised to build, since that is what they’ve been doing for nine months.