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Facebook page, pero por favor, as Alejandro Sanz likes to say, no es lo mismo ni es igual. She has not yet started to educate the public, large scale, about who Gimenez really is and why she might be a better alternative.
(3) Because of (2) above, her name recognition outside the city of Miami, where her father is mayor, is not even close to where it should be and far below Gimenez’s, especially after…
Read related story: Miami-Dade: Carlos Gimenez saves us — from himself
(4) Gimenez has recently used the bully pulpit megaphone to make “good news” announcements, including a lot of talk about transit and lowering tolls, updates on Liberty Square Rising — the largest public housing initiative ever embarked upon in the county in what is inarguably the most needy neighborhood — and a 2016 budget with no new tax rate increases but plenty of new services (which people forget Gimenez cut in the two prior years). The breathy “I have saved us” announcement came July 7. The poll of 600 registered voters was conducted July 8 to 14.
(5) All the mayoral announcements have created tons of earned media for Gimenez. Normally camera-shy, he’s been on the radio and TV rounds more often than usual and visited the Miami Herald editorial board just days ago. The week of the poll, during coverage of the budget details, he was cast as a savior and hero by a lot of media 
stories, including a Herald editorial during the second day of polling that basically praised Gimenez for “sharing the county’s bounty.”
The timing almost stinks a little, don’t it? That this poll would be conducted, out of the blue, 13 months from the election, on the same week of the budget announcement, in time to ride the mayor’s media high, seems like too much of a happy coincidence for the Gimenez camp. Ladra does not believe in coincidences.
“It was not a mayoral poll,” said Amandi, adding that the poll was originally developed around the questions on the issues, which had become timely in recent weeks. Voters were polled on the decision to treat marijuana with a citation and fine rather than arrest (62% favored it) and on the services provide by ride sharing companies like Uber, which have seen a crackdown in Broward and Monroe counties (70% favored). There was also a question about the new soccer stadium proposed site at Marlins Park — which an agreement for was announced this weekend, after the poll was completed.
Miami Herald Political Editor Jay Ducassi told Ladra that he and Amandi had been discussing the questions for at least 10 days before the polling team went out in the field July 8. While Ducassi would not discuss the specifics of who wrote the questions, who pushed the “go” button or confirm that the paper paid for the poll — in response to allegations in another report that it may have been paid by a third party — he said the process for its development was the same as in previous polls done for the paper by Bendixen and three other firms before theirs.
“When we do a poll, and I’ve been doing polls for 16 years, we never talk about any financial arrangements,” Ducassi said, sounding a little cryptic.
Why not? It’s a legitimate question and Ducassi should have no reason to decline to comment. That’s why campaign finance reports are public, right? Transparency is key, no? I didn’t ask how much he paid for it just whether he paid for it. We all wanted to know that Norman Braman was the one who paid for the poll that he shared with Regalado. Wouldn’t Ducassi be demanding to know who paid for the poll if it wasn’t him? Of course, he would. Which is why Ladra is giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Just as I gave it to the Herald when they commissioned the last Bendixen poll done almost exactly a year ago — when, by the way, 53% of the respondents thought Gimenez was doing a good or excellent job.
So the mayor’s numbers have slid, too.
Read related story: Poll: Mayor Carlos Gimenez is too comfy close to lobbyists
Ladra thinks they have actually slid further and that Bendixen and the Herald would have gotten some better, truer numbers had the poll not taken place on what is probably the mayor’s best week in at least a year. There’s a reason why the Gimenez campaign hasn’t released the results of their own internal poll, or polls, for which Dario Moreno has been paid $34,000 by the Miami-Dade Residents First PAC — $15,000 last month and $19,000 in April (which, by the way, is probably a lot more than the Herald paid).
And we haven’t heard a peep about those numbers.
Maybe it’s because they don’t reflect what can be argued is an artificially inflated lead in the Bendixen poll.
Or maybe it’s because the G-Men campaign team realizes one other important fact that could become the sixth thing to consider: And that is that Regalado is actually in a better spot than Gimenez was four months before the mayoral recall election of 2011, when he trailed former Hialeah Mayor Julio Robaina by 29 points.
In fact, Ladra heard that at it’s worst, the spread was Robaina, 41, Gimenez, 9 — and the man who would later be elected mayor actually wanted to quit, according to sources who all take credit for talking him into staying in the race.
And Robaina was not the incumbent riding a wave of positive news and breathy bully pulpit announcements.
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Poll results are nothing for Carlos Gimenez to brag about added by Ladra on
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