Bloomberg shitting a brick over turnout

From the NY Times:

Recalling the record-low turnouts in last month’s primary and runoff, Mr. Speiller exhorts Bloomberg volunteers to shift into overdrive. “Our efforts have been and will continue to be the most expansive and effective grass-roots operation this city has ever seen,” he said in a blog post dated Friday. “Tonight we will knock on our 1,500,000th door, make our 550,000th volunteer phone call and hand out literature at our 4,000th transit stop and high traffic location — and if you think that’s impressive, you haven’t seen anything yet!”

With the mayor leading in public opinion polls by 16 percentage points or more, most New Yorkers might think he has nothing to worry about. But elections have been lost — most notably David N. Dinkins’s 1993 re-election race — because people who insisted to pollsters that they supported a candidate ultimately did not bother to vote.

And a number of political analysts say that a predicted record-low turnout next Tuesday may jeopardize Mr. Bloomberg’s projected double-digit victory margin and even deliver him a third term with the lowest total vote received by a New York City mayor in nearly a century.

Those analysts discount the projections of a large margin of victory because, they argue, the most motivated voters are likely to be those who are angry with the mayor and inclined to vote against him, largely because of his reversal last year over term limits.