By Michael P. Ventura
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
With less than a week to go before Election Day, Manhattan's political class ponders one essential question: Will anyone show up to vote Nov. 3?
Workers manned largely empty polling stations during a runoff last month and, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg spending billions to take a double digit lead over comptroller William Thompson, voter apathy is high.
Doing well in polls, appears to be no guarantee of success for Bloomberg. If turnout is low, it could make for a stressful election day for the frontrunner.
"At the end of the day, every election is about one thing: making sure your supporters get to the polls and vote," Lenny Speiller, Bloomberg's get-out-the-vote director, blogged on the campaign's Web site.
"The primary in September was the lowest turnout election since the 1940s, so we've certainly got our work cut out for us."
To that end, Speiller urged supporters to attend a Bloomberg rally and even donate Facebook at Twitter status updates to help get out the vote.
But that's not all the Bloomberg campaign, which has burned through a record $85 million of the billionaire mayor's own money so far, is doing to make sure people get to the polls. Many will receive targeted "robo-calls" with a get to the polls message.
Chinatown residents older than 45, for example, could get a call that is two-thirds Chinese and one-third English, the Associated Press reported. Caribbean-American voters could get calls in English, but with a Caribbean accent. Liberals could hear from Planned Parenthood.
Some New Yorkers who live in high rise apartments could even get a call from building managers whom the Bloomberg campaign has reached out to.
Campaign officials estimate they will have 75 calls reaching 890,000 people, according to the AP.
Most campaigns "would do between five and 10 calls," Democratic strategist George Arzt told the AP. "You will never have another campaign like this."
Even though Bloomberg has an 18 point lead over Thompson in a recent Quinnipiac University poll, history warns that he shouldn't take it easy.
In 1993, pollsters predicted a huge win for former Mayor David Dinkins, but in the end, the New York Times reported, many voters decided to stay home, throwing the race narrowly to Rudy Giuliani. Political analysts interviewed by the Times said, given his projected huge lead and voter disdain for his reversal on term limits, they expected Bloomberg might be elected by the lowest vote total in a century.
“There’s no doubt that the term limit issue will be driving a lot of voters to the polls,” said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, told the paper, “but my guess is so will Bloomberg’s vans.”
The Times said there are 4.2 million New Yorkers registered to vote: Thompson's camp estimates that 1 million may turn out; Bloomberg's people peg it at 1.3 million.
"It's been shaping up all along, and now the new numbers say it looks like a Bloomberg blow-out," Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said when he released his poll last week.
But he added a caveat: "Will voters see those big Bloomberg numbers and decide they don't need to vote, or will the mayor's well-oiled machine get them to the polls to run up the score?"
