Sun Poll

The Baltimore school system earned poor marks from Democratic voters in the city, according to a new Sun poll, which shows education second only to crime as the most important issue in this year's mayoral election. Asked to grade the city schools, respondents gave the system an average mark of D-plus. Forty-two percent selected grades of D or Fail. Forty-nine percent of poll respondents ranked schools as the largest or second-largest challenge facing the city. That compares with 86 percent for crime and 15 percent for the issue in third place, the economy and availability of jobs.

Thirty-three days of frustration ended for unbeaten and third-ranked St. Mary's yesterday.The Saints caught up with Catholic League rival and No. 1 Seton Keough in Annapolis and sent the Gators down to a 52-39 defeat behind the 10-for-10 fourth-quarter free-throw shooting of freshman Maria Smear.Smear's performance at the line led a 22-6 run that wiped out a 33-30 Seton Keough lead at the end of the third quarter."It feels great to win this game," Smear said. "We've waited so long to play them.

At an East Baltimore community development office early in this campaign season, City Council President Mary Pat Clarke met a group of black women active in neighborhood affairs. They all knew her, greeted her warmly and talked at length about projects they had worked on with her.Here, it seemed, was a building block in Mrs. Clarke's vigorous drive to unseat the two-term mayor, Kurt L. Schmoke.When Mrs. Clarke left the office, a co-worker asked these women whether they would vote for her in the September primary.

Woe is Baltimore when it comes to being a sports town.Our baseball team has been on strike for five months. Our football team plays the Canadian game, not the NFL's. Our soccer and lacrosse teams play outdoor sports indoors. There's no pro hockey.There is one area in which our town excels, though. That's high school basketball.That will be evident once again this week when the fourth annual First National Bank of Maryland Charm City Classic is held at Loyola College's Reitz Arena.Some of the best teams in the country will be playing here, including a couple local schools.

Since early summer, the four major candidates for City Council president have run a quiet campaign and left the daily drama to the mayoral race -- unwittingly taking themselves out of the limelight and the minds of some voters.Now that there are just a few days before Tuesday's Democratic primary, the candidates -- all in a dead-heat in a mid-August Sun poll -- say they are changing tactics. Gone are the folksy appeals for votes, replaced by pleas on radio and television.Voters "are not paying attention to us," said candidate Carl Stokes.

A week ago we were under siege around here because, in The Sun's Top 15 high school football poll, Howard High got dropped 10 places (from No. 5 to No. 15) following a one-point loss in the last minute to 15th-ranked Oakland Mills.People called. People wept. People said they were canceling subscriptions and were seriously considering moving out of state. One guy said he planned on leaving the reporters who vote in the poll out of his will. Picketing was planned.While Howard High was free-falling, Oakland Mills moved up one measly notch to No. 14. The whole thing seemed a bit illogical but, as Penn State coach Joe Paterno says almost daily from mid-August to Christmas, "The only poll that means anything is the last one."

For three quarters, it looked as if Johns Hopkins was in danger of suffering one of the biggest lacrosse upsets in its history.Unranked Georgetown, facing Hopkins for the first time, led the Blue Jays by a goal going into the final period.But Hopkins -- ranked No. 5 in The Baltimore Sun poll -- scored seven times in the final 15 minutes and won, 15-10, before a slim crowd of 511 at Homewood.The game had been postponed Saturday because of the TTC snowstorm. Hopkins maintenance crews removed snow from the artificial-turf field about two hours before the faceoff.

RAISE TAXES,'' the headline shrieked. ''And stop slashing state programs,'' the article went on to report. ''That's the clear message from Marylanders surveyed in the Sun Poll.''It was a heck of a way for a fiscal conservative to start a Monday morning, but it got my attention. My bleary eyes struggled to focus on the fire-engine-red ''Sun Poll'' logo.Honestly, I would have been intensely interested in reading about a poll that could produce such an astonishing result even without the inch-high headline . . . and even if I hadn't been one of the 1,210 Maryland voters surveyed.

Citizens to legislators: Raise taxes and stop slashing state programs.That's the clear message from Marylanders surveyed in The Sun Poll."People are seeing the state of Maryland going down the tubes," said John Gregory, a 48-year-old Perry Hall Middle School math teacher who was among the poll's respondents. "To prevent that from happening, I'd be willing to have them take a little more and get us going in the right direction."Despite pressures brought on by the recession, two-thirds of the poll's respondents said they would rather see the General Assembly adopt a combination of budget cuts and tax increases than try to balance the budget exclusively through deep cuts in government spending.

Marylanders think violent crime has grown worse in the past year, but outside Baltimore most believe their own neighborhoods are safe, according to a survey released yesterday at the Governor's Summit on Violent Crime.In the city, 60 percent said crime in their neighborhoods was a serious problem.And while 23 percent of Marylanders polled said they had been a victim of crime in the last year, most were unwilling to support a tax increase to build more prisons."There are indications that the public is accepting crime as a way of life," that it's "just something they have to accept and put up with," said Dr. Charles Wellford, who conducted the survey for the University of Maryland Institute of Criminal Justice and Criminology.

Haverford (Pa.) has proved it has one of the most formidable defenses in the country. The team is ranked No. 19 nationally by insidelacrosse.com, and going into yesterday's game at Gilman, the Fords had not given up more than five goals in a game this season. But the Greyhounds, ranked No. 2 in the area in the latest Sun poll, eclipsed that total in the third quarter. Gilman (7-0) scored 10 goals in the second half - including six in the third quarter - in an 11-8 win over the Fords. "It's awesome.

Feeling pinched by a weakening economy and higher taxes, Marylanders are generally looking forward to the growth expected from military base expansion rather than worrying about how it might worsen traffic jams or crowd classrooms, a new Sun poll shows. Forty-nine percent of those asked said they thought it would be a good thing for the state if a projected 28,000 new families move here in the next few years as a result of the nationwide base realignment and closure, commonly called BRAC.

Nancy S. Grasmick, the state's long-serving schools superintendent who is fighting to keep her job, gets a C-plus from Maryland voters, according to a new Sun poll. And fewer than a third think she should have been given a new four-year term. Despite rating Maryland schools and Grasmick's job performance slightly above average, just 30 percent of voters said the State Board of Education was right to re-appoint her last month, while 44 percent said they would like "someone new." A quarter had no opinion or were not sure.

As the General Assembly gears up for a debate on the rights of gay couples, a solid majority of Maryland voters supports some form of legalized same-sex unions, according to a recent Sun poll. Nineteen percent of likely voters said they support gay marriage, and 39 percent said they back civil unions, meaning that nearly three out of five believe the state should formally recognize same-sex relationships. Maryland law bans same-sex marriage. Thirty-one percent of those polled said they disagree with granting either form of same-sex unions, but only half of those opponents said a constitutional amendment is needed to ban them.

Ten months before Maryland voters will decide whether to legalize slot machines, a strong majority is in favor of expanding gambling across the state, a new Sun poll found. Fifty-six percent of likely voters support amending the Maryland Constitution to authorize 15,000 slot machines in five jurisdictions, the poll found. Just over one-third of the respondents said they oppose slots. However, an equally strong majority opposes using state funds to subsidize Maryland's beleaguered horse racing industry, a major component of the plan that lawmakers crafted in a November special session of the General Assembly.

A month after New Jersey became the first state in decades to abolish the death penalty, a majority of Maryland voters do not support enacting a similar repeal, according to a new Sun poll. Fifty-seven percent said they want the death penalty to remain legal, while 33 percent said they would ban it. About 10 percent of likely voters polled said they were not sure. Support for capital punishment ran the highest among residents of Baltimore County - where prosecutors are more likely to seek a death sentence for convicted killers than anywhere else in the state - and in Anne Arundel County, the Eastern Shore and Western Maryland.

Gov. Martin O'Malley and his fellow Democrats in the state legislature brushed aside any concerns yesterday about his dismal approval ratings and voter discontent over tax increases approved during the November special session, saying that even if they aren't doing what is popular, they are doing what is right. "Popularity is a nice thing, and I have enjoyed it from time to time as a public servant," O'Malley said yesterday. "But more important to me is making the right decisions for the long-term interests of the people I serve."

Sen. Barack Obama built a fragile advantage among Maryland Democrats heading into the nation's first primaries of 2008, with the state's large black population solidifying around the candidacy of a promising African-American leader, a new Sun poll shows. But Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's win in New Hampshire has likely tightened the Democratic contest, The Sun's pollster said. Among Republicans in Maryland, Sen. John McCain of Arizona holds a narrow edge over former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, with former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney close behind, according to the poll.

Voters are profoundly dissatisfied with the $1.3 billion in tax increases passed during November's special legislative session, and a majority consider the package unfair, according to a new Sun Poll. As a result, public approval of Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, has dropped precipitously, particularly among the blue-collar voters he says he sought to protect in crafting a solution to the state's projected budget shortfalls. Just over a year after O'Malley won 53 percent of the vote, only 35 percent of voters approve of the way he's handled his job. In one of the nation's most staunchly Democratic states, O'Malley's approval rating is just 8 percentage points above President Bush's rating in the same poll.

Despite lagging in the polls, City Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. said yesterday that he was confident he could pull an upset in the city's Sept. 11 mayoral primary. "The poll today is not reflective of what's happening in the streets of Baltimore," he said. "We're not going to allow a poll, or The Baltimore Sun, or a polling company to determine the election. That poll will not be reflective of Election Day." In a Sun poll conducted late last month, 19 percent of likely Democratic voters surveyed supported Mitchell, while 46 percent backed Mayor Sheila Dixon.