Wrapping Up, Mayor and Ferrer Ask Voters to Ignore Polls

On the final Sunday before the election, the New York City mayoral candidates made competing last-minute appeals to voters on the need for change versus the need to stay the course, and both sides made urgent appeals to their supporters to turn out tomorrow despite polls predicting a lopsided victory for the incumbent.

With just three days left in the contest, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his Democratic challenger, Fernando Ferrer, concentrated on rallying voters in areas containing their most faithful supporters as their organizations began a final blizzard of phone calls and door-to-door canvassing aimed at getting supporters to vote tomorrow.

Despite all the polls showing an overwhelming victory for Mr. Bloomberg, the final result will depend upon which side can turn out more of its supporters on Election Day, as both sides agree that turnout remains an open question.

On Mr. Ferrer’s team, the chance of an overwhelming turnout among his supporters was providing the only hope. The Bloomberg team was only too aware of that possibility, and yesterday they made a forceful display of their strength in several neighborhoods, with a rally of thousands and an aggressive get-out-the-vote push.

“If our vote stays home and Ferrer gets the historic Latino turnout he’s looking for, it changes the dynamic of the race,” said Patrick Brennan, who is overseeing Mr. Bloomberg’s enormous voter-turnout operation. That operation is now working to stave off a potential new opponent, voter apathy.

Barnstorming through campaign events and churches in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Mr. Ferrer told supporters that the polls were wrong now, just as they have been before, and he expressed confidence in his chances in what he has painted as a David versus Goliath struggle.

Telling parishioners at the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem that “the fog is lifting,” allowing people to see more clearly, Mr. Ferrer said, “there are a great many places in the city, this being one of them, where there is a palpable, measurable energy and thirst in the streets for change, for hope, for opportunity, so I feel good, I feel very good.”

Later in the day, his point was bolstered by a chaotic, exuberant walk with prominent Democrats, including Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Congressman Charles B. Rangel, up St. Nicholas Avenue in Washington Heights. Residents hung out of apartment windows and passers-by chanted Mr. Ferrer’s name. Indeed, Mr. Ferrer and his supporters spent much of the day trying to show that the energy level on the streets was a more accurate gauge of his strength than the polls were.

After visiting three churches, Mr. Ferrer attended a lunch in the Bronx with his wife, Aramina, and Mrs. Clinton, then drove around the borough for hours in a caravan.

Speaking to voters on St. Nicholas Avenue near 178th Street, Mrs. Clinton offered encouraging words for Mr. Ferrer. “It all depends upon who votes on Tuesday and I think that this enthusiasm and the incredibly unified elected officials that you see here and throughout the city, I absolutely think that you’re looking at the next mayor of the city of New York,” she said. “We want to make sure that anyone who thinks this race is over is disabused of that, because it is not. No race is over until the polls close and the votes are counted.”

At the same time, as Mr. Ferrer has remained focused on Mr. Bloomberg’s near-record spending, he was offering an argument that could not only bring support to his candidacy but could also provide a dignified justification for a potential loss – even one by a broad margin. Asked by reporters if he could think of any mistakes he made in the campaign, he retorted, “Not having $50 million to spend.”

As Joseph Mercurio, a consultant who had advised one of Mr. Ferrer’s primary rivals, C. Virginia Fields, put it, “Rather than making the case in the end game for why voters should choose Ferrer, they are explaining why they lost – Bloomberg is a billionaire who bought a big TV buy that re-elected him.”

The power of incumbency was on full display yesterday. Riding in a convertible along the route of the New York City Marathon, Mr. Bloomberg waved to onlookers along the race route in four boroughs. (He skipped the Bronx portion, for logistical reasons.)

Later, speaking to thousands of Hasidic Jews in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the mayor warned against complacency.

Mr. Bloomberg, wearing a yarmulke, appeared on a dais adorned with blue balloons that read “Mike the Mensch” alongside a band called the Shloime Dachs Orchestra – which was playing the song “Eye of the Tiger” from the movie “Rocky III.”

“I need your help – please do not take this election for granted,” the mayor told the crowd. “I don’t care what the newspapers and the polls say.”

Indeed, for the second day in a row, a newspaper had all but declared Mr. Bloomberg the winner based on a poll, with New York Newsday running a large headline beside a photograph of Mr. Bloomberg that read “King of New York” and a smaller one that read, “It’s Bloomberg in a runaway.” Those headlines were based on a new Newsday/NY1 News poll showing Mr. Bloomberg ahead by 32 percentage points. The New York Post declared on Saturday, “It’s Over.”

But if the day was notable for anything, it was the lack of engagement between the campaigns, as the mayor never once uttered his challenger’s name and Mr. Ferrer threw few punches at him.

Aides to both campaigns said the lack of theatrics could be taken as a sign that the final phase of the race was to play out not so much in the news media but on the streets, with both campaigns starting enormous operations to pull voters to the polls tomorrow.

The two field operations are being run by men who worked together at the political office of 1199/S.E.I.U, the health care workers’ union: Mr. Brennan for Mr. Bloomberg and Patrick Gaspard for Mr. Ferrer.

Mr. Brennan said yesterday that Mr. Bloomberg had assembled the largest vote-getting operation in city history, with 1,100 volunteer captains organizing letter-writing campaigns in 1,100 areas telling their neighbors why they are voting for Mr. Bloomberg, and urging the recipients to do the same. Mr. Brennan estimated that more than 300,000 such letters have been written.

The campaign’s volunteers and paid canvassers, along with volunteers from unions like 32BJ, the building workers’ union, and the carpenters, will have knocked on nearly two million doors by tomorrow, beseeching people to vote for Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Brennan said. Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign in the last two days has focused heavily on boosting turnout in Jewish enclaves, with the mayor addressing huge gatherings of Hasidic Jews on Saturday night and yesterday afternoon.

But campaign aides said they were trying to make inroads among Hispanics and were hoping for groundbreaking support from black voters for a Republican candidate.

“There is not a neighborhood or a community where we’re not battling at this point,” Mr. Brennan said.

Mr. Ferrer’s aides have also been working to rouse supporters throughout the city, but have been hoping for outsize results among Hispanics and in Mr. Ferrer’s home base in the Bronx. “Obviously, there isn’t a corner of the Bronx that we don’t feel competitive in,” Mr. Gaspard said.

Although the Ferrer campaign, with its limited resources, cannot come close to matching Mr. Bloomberg’s operation in numbers, Mr. Gaspard is nonetheless in charge of several thousand volunteers. Some, he said, are from 1199, with its formidable turnout machine, the Transport Workers Union and the Working Families Party, but most are “people who have never done anything political in their lives other than vote.”

The campaign has been particularly active in parts of northern Manhattan, central and brownstone Brooklyn and central and southeastern Queens. With phone calls, posters, sound trucks, leaflets and door-to-door visits, the campaign is taking aim at areas where information gleaned from this year’s primary, the 2004 presidential race and the 2001 mayoral election suggests that Mr. Ferrer has opportunities for support.