You don’t need a pollster to know which way the political winds are blowing to feel that Democrat Vinnie Gentile is inching towards a possible upset of presumed far-ahead frontrunner Republican Dan Donovan for the vacant 11th Congressional seat straddling Staten Island and a piece of Southern Brooklyn.
Not that Marist, Sienna or any other polling company has been making phone calls to see what issues are on the voters radar or for whom they are likely to vote, but both camps confirmed they have done internal polling, and their response to KCP inquires is telling.
Sources close to the Gentile campaign said the poll showed the race is tightening up, while Donovan spokesperson Jessica Proud refused to discuss internal polling.
“If they (Team Gentile) reveal any information regarding a poll, they are required by law to release the whole thing to the public,” she noted.
Gentile campaign manager Chris McCreight said the reason no objective polls were done yet is probably because it is a special election and has little precedent in New York politics.
And McCreight is no slouch to politics and elections. A native of Bay Ridge blue-collar Democratic Party politics, he’s built like a tight end, and headed the Obama campaign in Brooklyn and Staten Island in 2008. More recently, he comes from former Assemblyman Karin Camara’s office and the rough-and-tough world of Central Brooklyn politics.
“It’s going to be a low turnout – between 30,000-40,000 voters,” says McCreight. “Our job is in getting our vote out just like their (Donovan’s camp) job is to get their vote out.”
McCreight noted that Gentile received over 12,000 votes in the recent City Council race and he used to represent Staten Island’s highly Democratic North Shore. It’s a much more dense neighborhood of Staten Island where getting the vote out logistically is easier than in the more suburban parts of Staten Island where Donovan’s base resides, he noted.
“We know there’s 20,000 people willing to vote for Vinnie. Our job is to get them to the polls to vote,” McCreight said.
Then there’s Gentile, a battle-hardened political veteran, who served three terms in the state senate before becoming a city councilman. He’s proven to be a very able, smart and charismatic debater against Donovan and continues to pile on points every time Donovan fails to show up for a debate as he did at today’s scheduled Bay Ridge Senior Center debate.
Team Gentile also has a good finger on the pulse for controlling the political narrative, painting Donovan as an out-of-touch candidate with little knowledge of several key issues such as raising the minimum wage.
The takeaway feeling is that Donovan is beginning to feel like a GOP version of Domenic Recchia, the very-flawed Democrat who lost to convicted felon Michael Grimm for the seat last year. And just like Recchia, it’s Donovan’s election to lose as he is a heavy favorite.
The irony is Recchia lost despite the Democratic National Committee opening up the money spigot to get him elected, and in this election the DNC has all but thrown in the towel while the Republican National Committee and such GOP bigwigs as the Koch Brothers are reportedly throwing money behind Donovan.
But that’s the funny thing about special elections as opposed to long drawn out election cycles. It’s not the momentum that money buys and endorsements bring, but the ground game and tight organization.
And on that front, Gentile appears to be closing the gap.
