PUBLIC LIVES; A Diviner of Meaning in Political Names and Lists

Published: July 31, 2001

AS the September primaries approach, hundreds of attention-starved politicians are working the city like entertainers at an enormous birthday party, making balloon animals in the living room while the children sit in the den, watching Barney. Still, certain surnames get bandied about: Badillo, Bloomberg, Ferrer, Green, Hevesi, Vallone, Skurnik.



Jerry Skurnik, 52, is short and slight, with a voice that seems to emanate from his nostrils. He spends his days jabbing away at a computer keyboard in his small office, where the only window offers a dirt-streaked view of Times Square brick. A power lunch for him is whatever can be super-sized at the McDonald's around the corner. He is the kind of man who might be noticed at a political fund-raiser only after knocking into a tray of glasses.

But he is also the man whom most politicians in New York City call on to help them figure out who the voters are, where they are, and how to pique their interest. He is, after all, the master of the lists: the names of potential voters for every neighborhood block in the city, tweaked and manipulated to help his politically ambitious customers focus their mass mailings and phone banks.

He says, for example, that he can identify those who usually vote in primaries (people he calls ''primes''), and those who always vote in primaries (known as ''super primes''); who owns and who rents; who is a Polish Jew and who is a Polish Catholic. In the brochure for their company, Prime New York, he and his partner, Stuart Osnow, clearly capitalize on the insecurities of political consultants by reminding them that ''young female Democratic voters in liberal precincts may be the key to put your candidate over the top.''

The charm of these lists may not be apparent to those whose names appear on said lists, but Mr. Skurnik is more than willing to explain. The lists allow candidates to tailor their message to a specific audience -- to trumpet an obscure endorsement or address a local issue. ''You also might want to avoid contacting someone you think might vote for someone else,'' he says. ''It's a waste, and you convince them to come out and vote against you.''

There are other list providers; what makes Mr. Skurnik distinctive is his encyclopedic knowledge of New York politics. For example, he can rattle off the names of every candidate in the dozens of City Council races, in part because most of them have expressed interest in his services.

Democratic candidates for City Council in the First District in Manhattan?

''Posner, Margaret Chin, Kwong Hui,'' he says. ''There's Rocky Chin, Alan Gerson, Johnny Fratta and Brad Hoylman. And we've had dealings with six of them.''

But he does more than political parlor tricks; he understands the curious ways in which the city does not hew to standard demographic grids. He knows, for example, that in New York, most of the eastern European surnames are Jewish -- except in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, a Polish Catholic enclave.

He tells with delight the story of a Texas consulting firm that once told a political client that it had discovered thousands of potential voters of French-Canadian descent in New York City. Perhaps we could seize an issue that would appeal to our voting friends from the North -- bilingual signage, peut-être?

Of course, Mr. Skurnik says with an eye-roll, all those French-Canadians were in fact Haitian-Americans living in Brooklyn.