Columnist Jon Ralston: Bland Man’s lead evaporates

Friday, Sept. 13, 2002 | 4:55 a.m.

The county commissioner running for Congress had turned an early-year anointment into a March disappointment with a series of revelations about his actions on a billboard ordinance, his acquisition of a city Housing Authority contract and even his recommendation of a neighbor for a job at the fire department.

Suddenly, polls that had indicated his contest with Republican Jon Porter as a dead heat were showing him slipping into a double-digit deficit. Conventional wisdom said that because Porter had a substantial lead and had yet to spend any of his money on ads questioning Herrera's ethics, the commissioner was a walking dead man.

Now, though, with just over a month until early voting begins and about seven weeks until the general election, Herrera is back in the race. Like Bill Clinton, the man he is so often compared to because of his combination of political skills and questionable judgment, Reckless Boy has become The Comeback Kid. And if a new poll is to be believed -- and I think it is -- Herrera and Porter are neck-and-neck, or at least very close to it.

Doug Schoen, the national pollster who has done surveys for presidents and is one of the country's most respected in his field, conducted a post-primary poll for the Herrera campaign of 612 Third District voters -- a large sample with a margin of error of just under 4 percent.

Schoen, as he did in August, did two horse race questions -- one between the major candidates and one with all five candidates on the November ballot. Let's look at both:

Last month Schoen's numbers showed Porter ahead 44-36, during a time when Porter's pollster, Glen Bolger, was discovering similar numbers. So there has been movement.

How did this happen? How did a corpse get re-animated? How did Reckless Boy catch up to Bland Man?

Schoen's polls indicates that Bland Man is not so vanilla anymore, that the Democrats attempt to introduce the ex-state senator to the public as Insurance Man may be working. Since last month, shortly before those Democratic Party ads on Porter's insurance industry ties began, the Republican's unfavorability numbers have nearly doubled. They have risen from 10 percent in August to 18 percent now, putting them in Herrera territory (his are at 22 percent and were 24 percent in August).

The Republicans' failure to pummel Herrera over the summer -- ignoring the hoary political axiom that if you can't hit a man when he's down, when can you hit him? -- may have been costly. Schoen wrote in his memo that as voters begin to focus on issues, especially health care and the economy, "this trumps any charges on ethics."

Schoen asked a generic question, using campaign themes, about what kind of candidate voters prefer to reach that conclusion:

It wasn't even close. Voters, by a 42-24 margin, prefer Reckless and Unethical But Independent Boy to Ethical But Rich and Weak Man. If that's the message that seeps into the voters' consciousness, Porter will be the corpse.

But will it? Ah, that is the question. The Republicans still have seven figures to run ads raising questions about Herrera's ethics -- and he has given them enough fodder to do some damage. And the Democrats will spend their ample funds on ads portraying Porter as a special interest rollover -- those, too, could continue to have impact.

The scariest aspect for Porter, though, is this: If this race truly is even -- and it is at worst a five or six point contest now -- and if the issues are so muddy by Election Day with the TV ad glut, the best grass-roots team will win. And with all the work the Herrera campaign has put into that side of the campaign, and the labor folks revving up their high-tech voter ID program to help him, the Democrat has to have the advantage.

What once sounded very much like a valedictory for a tragically flawed candidate has begun to take on a much more up-tempo tune, one that now has the possibility of actually being the notes from a victory parade come Nov. 5.