Dixon's No. 1 rank in poll reflects women's comfort

The Baltimore Sun

I've seen women scream at her, with the kind of high-pitched emotion you generally reserve for an intimate. I've seen other women link arms with her, talking confidingly as with a girlfriend. But no matter the tenor of the encounter, they all tend to call her Sheila - no title, no last name.

That would be "Mayor" and "Dixon." And, according to a poll conducted last week for The Sun, she is ahead of the pack competing for the title in the coming election. She leads her closest competitor, City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell, 47 percent to 15 percent, according to the survey taken last week by the independent pollster OpinionWorks.

Polls are funny things, seeking to quantify what might not be entirely quantifiable, predict the behavior of the ever-unpredictable voter and find an if-A-then-B logic between how people feel and how they will act on Election Day. The general sense I got from the poll is this:

The No. 1 issue the mayor needs to deal with is crime.

The person or group most responsible for solving the crime problem, if you have to pick just one, is the police, followed by the mayor.

The person the mayor has running the Police Department, Leonard Hamm, has been ineffectual.

Dixon should remain mayor.

Dixon benefits, no doubt, from a unique set of circumstances that makes her both an incumbent - with all the trappings and power that the office provides - and a newcomer still too fresh in the role to bear total responsibility for the current state of affairs. She's only been mayor since January, when she began serving out the rest of Gov. Martin O'Malley's term, and many residents seem willing to give her more time to solve a crime problem that long predates her.

But I think the poll results also reflect a certain comfort level that many in the city - particularly women - feel with Dixon, something that goes beyond the whole approval-disapproval thing that a telephone survey can measure. Call it the Sheila Factor - that first-name, known-quantity sense of being able to imagine her living on your street, working in your office or going to your church.

As a reporter, when I think of Dixon, I tend to think of her in terms of news stories: the Utech controversy, in which she voted to grant city contracts to a company that employed her sister; the crime plan that initially required all detectives to take a turn walking a neighborhood beat but then quickly exempted the ones investigating homicides; the focus on recruiting new police officers when many believe the problem is retaining existing ones.

And, most recently, the brouhaha that was unfolding, even as the telephone poll was being conducted last week, over Dixon trying to temporarily spring a man from jail to attend the funeral of his 3-year-old son, killed when a careening car struck him on a West Baltimore street. While much talk-radio and letters-to-the-editor outrage ensued, I didn't think it was that big a deal: She asked, the judge and the corrections people said no, end of story. Well, not quite: Dixon apologized - kind of blaming her staff for not giving her the full 411 on the inmate's record - and then the apology became an issue of its own and, well, the story lived on for another news cycle.

The incident seemed like a bookend to one that occurred earlier, in March, when Dixon took heat for the police arresting and handcuffing a 7-year-old boy for riding a dirt bike - and later arresting his mother as well for allegedly hindering the police investigation.

At a meeting called by the NAACP, I remember a woman just screaming at Dixon, outraged that as a mother herself she did not personally go to the boy's house to apologize to his mother. I also remember thinking, I bet O'Malley wouldn't have been called to task, parent to parent, for not apologizing to the mother. But Dixon held her ground, and didn't apologize for not apologizing.

Flash forward to July, and now Dixon has apologized for what she said was an act of compassion for another mother, of a 3-year-old killed as he walked down a street.

These aren't exactly the kinds of incidents that figure directly into polls. But I think they speak to how voters - particularly women in the city - view a Dixon as opposed to an O'Malley.

"She seems like a person you know personally," said Linda Michelle Boyd, 47, of Edmondson Village.

"She's been there, done that, knows what we've gone through," said Nannie Davis, 67, who lives in the Patterson Park area. "I mean, she's been through a lot in her years coming up."

"She's a person that we know already," said Anna Mosley, 85, of Gwynn Oak.

None of these three women, who were among the 601 registered voters surveyed by OpinionWorks for The Sun's poll, actually knows Dixon. But they feel they do.

They're black, they're mothers and they're either divorced or widowed, giving them a certain connection to Dixon, who is separated and has two children. While none mentioned either of the two incidents, in a city where one in four households is headed by a woman, and the safety and well-being of their children loom large, I can't help but think that's a powerful connection.

Like Dixon, Boyd is the mother of two, although her children are older than the mayor's - one is a City College grad and now an attorney in Annapolis and the other is a college student in Baltimore. I could hear the pride in Boyd's voice when she talked about her kids, but also about seeing a black woman in charge of Baltimore.

"I'm not going to vote for her just because of that," Boyd said. "But it's hard for us. We have two strikes against us. This is a great step for a black woman to run a major city."

jean.marbella@baltsun.com

ONLINE Find Jean Marbella's column archive at baltimoresun.com/marbella

Copyright © 2021, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication | Place an Ad
72°