Thanks to Matt Florell's St. Pete Polls, throughout the past year, political junkies haven't had to rely solely upon the Tampa Bay Times to find out what's cooking in Pinellas County political races.
Florell's last poll showed Kathleen Ford losing some of her early momentum in the race for St. Pete mayor, and the Times'new survey out today (conducted by Braun Research of New Jersey in association with WUSF radio and Bay News 9) reiterates that slippage, with Bill Foster showing a solid 10-point lead over Ford, 30-20 percent, and Rick Kriseman in third place with 17 percent.
The survey also shows a close battle with black voters: Ford is leading Foster 28-25 percent. Kriseman only has 8 percent of that vote.
That leads to the obvious inquiry: Could Kriseman's poor showing with black voters make him the odd man out when the race goes from three to two candidates after Aug. 27?
Not at all, said Kriseman's campaign manager, Cesar Fernandez.
"Rick has had hundreds of conversations with voters in the African American community and his message is resonating," he told CL in an e-mail this morning. "People in St. Petersburg want someone new who will bring people together and tackle the challenges facing the city."
Fernandez also noted that Kriseman is within the margin of error of being in second place (Braun Research showed the margin at 3.4 percent), and he wasn't too concerned about his candidate's showing in the survey.
"This was conducted seven days after we went up on TV, started direct mail, and recruited more than 50 volunteer shifts over 3 days to help get Rick's message out to voters with absentee ballots," he said.
There's no doubt that Kriseman suffers a little bit with name reaction. That's because it has been a decade since he's gone before the entire city in an election (his last race was for City Council in 2003). Kriseman won elections for state representative in 2006, 2008 and 2010, but those were in his House district, not city wide. Meanwhile, Ford and Foster campaigned for this same office four years ago, and Ford also ran for mayor (and lost) to Rick Baker in 2001.
Fernandez is seizing on the fact that as of today, and according to this latest poll, 70 percent of the electorate doesn't favor re-electing the incumbent. "Not good," he wrote.
That might be true, but undoubtedly it's better to be at 30 percent than 17 percent at this juncture in the race. This week, more than 61,000 ballots were mailed out to voters who requested them, meaning the election has begun.