Floon: Float Like a Butterfly, Sink Like a Rock, Redux

The Floon collapse moves apace. As I originally said here, and explained here, the Flaherty-Yoon aliance was never more than a joint venture between two vanity candidates who had no chance of winning.

Now the Globe has released a poll showing the Mayor with a 52% - 32% lead over Flaherty, with the following crosstabs by ethnicity:

                              Menino   Flaherty    Other   Undecided
City of Boston LV      52%       32%           3%       13%
White                       47%       38%           2%       14%
African American      63%       23%           6%         9%
Hispanic                   70%       14%           3%       12%
Other                       40%        40%           0%       21%

If we compare apples-to-apples using May 10 data from the same pollster, we get:

Apples-to-Apples            Menino  Flaherty     Other     Undecided

City of Boston LV May      61%      23%          3%           14%
                       October   52%      32%          3%           13%

Apples-to-Apples
White                   May     56%      29%          1%           14%
                       October    47%      38%          2%           14%

Apples-to-Apples
AfricanAmerican May        69%      15%          3%           13%
                     October       63%      23%          6%             9%

Apples-to-Apples
Hispanic              May         74%     13%          2%           11%
                      October        70%     14%          3%           12%

Apples-to-Apples
Other                  May         59%        3%        22%          16%
                     October         40%       40%         0%           21%

The Mayors demographic support base remains within black and Latino communities; despite the pounding Menino has taken from the media, Latino and black slippage was minimal in the context of the primary-to-general dynamic to date.

The slippage consists almost entirely of lost white and Asian support; and forty percent of a total citywide population totalling less than 9% (lumping all nonwhites, nonblacks, and non-Latinos together as "other") is nowhere near a winning margin. Within the poll's margin of error, this indicates little change fron September 22.

Considering the numbers from the Preliminary, where the Menino, Flaherty, and Yoon percentages were 50.52%, 23.95%, and 21.16%  (and considering the 4.2% McCrea vote), an effective anti-Menino coalition would have resulted in a dead heat, reflecting the 49.23% non-Menino preliminary vote. That didn't happen.

The 4.4% margin of the UNH/Globe poll shows no real change in Menino's support since the preliminary, which leads me to conclude that most of the electoral damage to the Mayor occurred in the summer phase of the election cycle; was media-driven; and was not exploited by the Flaherty campaign at the neighborhood level.  There was, in fact, an anti-Menino undercurrent that a competent field operation could have used to boost Flaherty's support, but addressing this was sacrificed in favor of a totally symbolic Floon effort, whose whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Relative to the money spent collectively by the Flaherty and Yoon campaigns, the result was a half-assed media campaign, not a municipal insurgency; and as such, a cautionary example of the self-inflicted limits such campaigns  face against operatives on the ground.

Unfortunately, the UNH sampling model does not correspond with neighborhood cultures, but I think that an informed prediction remains that (even with Yoon) Flaherty is walled into South Boston and Neponset, with insufficient Floon-derived Back Bay and Jamaica Plain numbers to materially affect Menino's current base.

The Dog is currently indulging himself in an "I told you so" that approaches an unseemly level of gloating