The latest poll results on the 2016 Miami-Dade mayoral race may 
not be good news for School Board Member Raquel Regalado, whose numbers slipped from poll markers released six months ago.
But it’s even worse news for Mayor Carlos Gimenez.
Sure, he’s got a 23-point lead of his sole declared challenger, a lead you will likely hear about a lot this week as his trumpeters spread the news. But the more important results, especially 13 months from an election, are that only half of the voters polled think he’s doing a good or excellent job as mayor — and even fewer of those, only 40 percent, would vote for him today.
That’s really a bad showing. Especially since they like so much of his initiatives.
Read related story: Tiny gap in Raquel Regalado poll is huge, but no big surprise
The poll, conducted earlier this month by Bedixen & Amandi for The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, was really an issues poll, with the mayoral and presidential questions thrown in because, well, because they were doing a countywide poll and you have to take advantage of the opportunity, right?
And voters seem to be happy with everything.
Close to 70% want the mega mall/theme park that the mayor secured for Northwest Miami-Dade.
Closer to 80 percent support both a soccer stadium by Marlins Park in Little Havana and body cameras on police officers.
Seventy percent of the respondents think that jobs — which has been the mayor’s mantra (read: campaign message) in recent weeks — is the most important issue facing the county.
So if his rhetoric and all his pet projects are so popular, why is the incumbent mayor with more than four years in office not doing better? Why were a majority of the respondents (43%) undecided?
“The poll shows that while the mayor has a significant lead over his current challenger, he’s still 
vulnerable because so many people are undecideds,” said pollster Fernand Amandi. “It just appears that Raquel Regalado is not that challenger.”
Funny enough, Amandi did a poll for auto mogul Norman Braman just six months ago that showed Regalado within six points of Gimenez. According to this new poll, the mayor went up 10 points and she slid seven. Maybe because the new poll did not include Commissioner Xavier Suarez as a potential candidate? He hasn’t made his decision, but got 15% of the support in the Braman January poll.
Maybe the poll bodes best for Suarez, as someone who can come in and appeal to the undecideds and some of Regalado’s anti-Gimenez votes. Because both polls have that same thing in common: They present the best news to whoever that perfect candidate waiting in the wings might be. Amandi, who bleeds blue, might naturally want that to be a Democrat who would make it rain for Hillary Clinton in November, but I don’t think he would intentionally skewer the numbers and risk his reputation as a solid pollster for that.
Still, while he and others want to cast this as Regalado’s death knoll, they might want to look at the results in context. Here are five things to consider:
(1) We are 13 months from the election. So if a poll is a snapshot in time, this one has gotta be a pretty damn blurry picture.
(2) Regalado, as she said, has not really begun to campaign. While she has been front and center on the issues and countered Gimenez on everything, which i
s too much, she hasn’t done any countywide messaging to registered voters in either ads or mailers or phone banks. The mayor, meanwhile, had an ad in the paper about body cameras the week of the poll and a radio spot either right before or during. Both were paid by a non profit called Business Action League, which is a 501C4 that does not have to disclose who paid for the promos (more on that later). Regalado may have published a few videos on her
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Poll results are nothing for Carlos Gimenez to brag about added by Ladra on
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