NEW YORK — Eliot Spitzer's 11th-hour comeback campaign isn't just a race to the finish. It's a sprint to the start.
After plunging into the city comptroller's race Monday, the scandal-scarred ex-governor has until midnight Thursday to collect 3,750 valid petition signatures to get on the Democratic primary ballot for September.
"The number is big," Spitzer said Wednesday outside a Manhattan bar where his campaign was holding a petition-signing party for supporters. "Three thousand seven hundred and fifty is a significant number of petitions to gather in three days."
Still, he said he felt confident his campaign would collect enough signatures by the deadline, but he refused to say how many more he needed.
Spitzer got encouraging news from the first poll taken since he became a candidate. He topped fellow Democratic hopeful Scott Stringer by 42 percent to 33 percent among registered Democrats, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC 4 New York-Marist survey, which questioned 546 people and had a margin of error of 4.2 percentage points.
Spitzer said that while the poll numbers were "comforting" he was aware he had more work to do.
"I'm never confident," he said. "And that is defensive politics."
Stringer campaign manager Sascha Owen expressed confidence that Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, would prevail as more voters get to know him.