Lawn Signs and Groceries: Mayoral Metrics
For the past month, as I have driven through all eight wards of the District, I've kept a running tally of lawn signs in support of one or another of the five candidates for mayor. Here's the count:
Adrian Fenty: 320
Linda Cropp: 95
Marie Johns: 26
Michael Brown: 10
Vincent Orange: 5
What does that mean? Does it tell us that the Fenty campaign puts more stock in lawn signs as a campaign tactic than do the other campaigns? Does it tell us that there's more grassroots support for Fenty than for the others at this date, two months from the Democratic primary? Does it tell us that the Fenty campaign is better organized on the ground than the others? And does it say that this is really a two-person race, pitting Ward 4 council member Fenty against council chairman Cropp?
Most likely, there's a little bit of Yes to all of those questions. Just how much is hard to say in a campaign in which there has as yet been very little in the way of reputable independent polling. (There are some polls commissioned by candidates and they point to a Fenty-Cropp faceoff, but District voters have a long history of deciding late and backing someone other than the candidates put forth by the conventional wisdom.)
The Foggy Bottom Association, a neighborhood group in Northwest, commissioned a poll by the Mellman Group last month, and it showed Fenty up by six points over Cropp, 34-28. Fenty led among both blacks and whites, though more handily among whites. No other candidate polled more than four percent.
If you enjoy non-scientific efforts to read the tea leaves such as my sign-counting, you may like the supermarket surveys conducted by my friend Bernard Demczuk, a longtime political strategist for Marion Barry and an assistant vice president at George Washington University. Demckuz greets D.C. residents outside supermarkets in all eight wards--don't write in to remind me that there is no supermarket in Ward 8; Demczuk and I both are all too aware of that continuing shame of the city, and he therefore asks his questions at two other sites in the ward, including the Big Chair on MLK Boulevard and the intersection of MLK and Malcolm X.
Here are the numbers he came up with after interviews with 625 potential voters:
Fenty: 41 percent
Cropp: 38 percent
Brown: 9 percent
Orange: 7 percent
Johns: 4 percent
In the council chair race, he found his respondents split almost exactly evenly, at 48 percent each for Kathy Patterson and Vincent Gray.
Demczuk completed his survey a few weeks ago, so the picture may have shifted already. He'll have another survey done a couple of weeks before the vote, which is also around the time the Post usually does its pre-election polling in D.C. races.
Meanwhile, the mayoral forums continue almost every evening.
By Marc Fisher |
July 11, 2006; 7:27 AM ET
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Posted by: Would-Be PQ Shopper | July 11, 2006 9:15 AM
Oh well, it looks like you started up a conversation of nothing....only 1 now 2 responses and 1 doesn't touch the idea of elections.
Which to me represents voter turn out.
I would like to see a study done on voting and why people don't do it.
Thanks
Posted by: Frankey | July 11, 2006 1:03 PM
Marc,
If you and your colleagues spent a little time covering the only candidate -- Marie Johns -- who actually holds events in the neighborhoods that all candidates are TALKING about helping, those polls might even out. Please check out her Better City For All Tour.... you guys have all been writing about poverty -- now that there is a candidate doing more than talking about it it behooves you to cover her!
Posted by: Gregory Kaufmann | July 11, 2006 3:19 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.
Just for the record, we need a supermarket in Penn Quarter too.