A new Marist poll showed that incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg leads challenger City Comptroller William Thompson by 15 points among likely voters, 53% to 38%. What's more, the poll notes, "Mayor Bloomberg’s action to extend term limits from two to three terms is not a deciding factor for 45% of voters. Although a large proportion of voters — 43% — says it makes them less likely to vote for the mayor, this number has not grown through the course of the campaign."
While this number is similar to the Quinnipiac poll (Bloomberg 53%, Thompson 35%), there are caveats: Marist Poll director Lee Miringoff told the Daily News, "That 53 is not in and of itself an overwhelming number. It means that almost half the city say they're either undecided or plan on voting for somebody else. So, for an incumbent of two terms, that suggests a good lead, but not, not necessarily one where he's going to run up the score." And Thompson's campaign pointed out that Marist's poll before the 2005 election wasn't accurate, since it said Bloomberg had a 40 point lead but actually won the election by 20 points.
Thompson's campaign revealed details of an internal poll that showed he was trailing Bloomberg by 8 points. However, PolitickerNY described the conference call to announce the results as "hastily" arranged—the pollster had to break out his calculator to answer a question about the poll's margin of error (4 points)—and City Room said, "These kinds of internal polls do not meet the polling standards that The New York Times other news media outlets and other polling groups use when conducting polls."
