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Saturday, November 02, 2002
Golisano Dropping Out? The Jewish Sabbath just concluded, so I'm only now catching up on news from...three hours ago. It's beginning to look like Golisano option #1(endorsing McCall) -- is the reason why he's dropped the ads. If there's any sign that McCall has run a truly horrible campaign, it's by the numbers in this Times story (link via OxBlog) that have Pataki with a 21-point lead over McCall when Golisano is taken out of the equation. Of course, this shouldn't be much of a surprise, since a helluva lot of Golisano's support relies on Republican and anti-establishment themes, neither of which helps McCall. Of course, recently, Golisano's been chasing more-Democratic coatheels with marijuana legalization and, of course, his "McCall won't win" ads.
This development will mean that McCall was able to coax two well-funded candidates into quitting and being thoroughly unable to capitalize their support into a winning campaign. With Golisano, McCall will have won every major gubernatorial contender -- Phil McConkey supported Cuomo, and de La Guardia supported Golisano -- and near-zero support. Cuomo was polling well with Hispanics, McCall isn't; Golisano is polling well upstate, McCall likely won't.
AND, the #1 way you know that Joel Siegel doesn't have a clue what's going on is that he still thinks Cappelli is the guy with the answers to his questions (towards the bottom here).
AND another thing: Golisano people will still vote Golisano especially since he'd be dropping out with only 48 hours left until the election. Cuomo dropped out with a full week left and still garnered 90,000 votes.
OF COURSE, given this, it's not entirely impossible that we won't see Golisano option #3 -- some sort of scandal that's making him drop out; given the shoddy impact of his endorsing McCall, as already outlined, this becomes a viable possibility.
AND IT WOULDN'T BE FAIR to say all this without acknowledging that he might have some kind of crazy last-minute strategy planned -- maybe a five-million-dollar field operation, just not likely.
Steven I. Weiss 6:05:00 PM
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