Luckily for Ige, Madame Pele seems to be playing politics with Hawaii’s race for governor

If Gov. David Ige’s prospects for re-election are soaring as indicated by the new Honolulu Star-Advertiser poll, I can tell you the day the tide changed.

Ige came into the election as something of a marked man. His popularity with legislative leaders in both the House and Senate has not just sagged, it evaporated. The Democrats running both chambers, including top committee honchos, were not just endorsing U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa’s bid to unseat Ige, they were raising money for her.

The newspaper’s first major poll of the season had Hanabusa over Ige 47 percent to 27 percent. The bad news continued with Ige’s job performance rating also in the gutter. The March telephone poll taken by Mason- Dixon Polling and Strategy of 800 registered voters had Ige’s job approval rating at 39 percent approve, with 49 percent disapproving. Most worrisome for Ige was that 50 percent of AJA (Americans of Japanese Ancestry) voters didn’t like the job he was doing.

Come July, though, the new poll shows Ige slightly leading Hanabusa, 44 percent to 40 percent, in terms of margin of error; that’s a tie. And job approval? A full 54 percent giving thumbs-up job approval, with AJA voter job approval at 57 percent.

So what changed? Was the false missile alert and the fumbling inability of the Ige administration to retract the warning just “fake news?”

What about Hanabusa slamming Ige?

“We have a long-standing Airport Modernization Plan, but execution has been plagued by delays, mismanagement, bidding and contracting mistakes, and lax oversight. Construction projects have taken years longer than planned and gone millions over budget,” she said.

Had Hanabusa been making all that up? No, but Mother Nature, or at least Madame Pele, had yet to speak. In May, the Big Island’s eruption started with Pahoa lava outbreaks that are now pegged at the most extensive in 200 years.

So here’s when the election shifted: June 5. Ed Sniffen, the transportation department’s deputy director for highways, appears on TV while standing in a Big Island lava field, bossing around bulldozer crews as they work on emergency bypasses for Highway 130.

“Now the governor gave us a directive, he let us know that he wants us to ensure that we are staying ahead of the lava flow. We can’t stop it, but we can prepare for it,” said Sniffen, the DOT’s most credible spokesman. That’s real action in the field.

When the Zipmobiles stopped working in 2015, backing up the morning and evening commute and the DOT not answering media calls until the middle of the morning, it was Sniffen tasked with going on TV to apologize, although later Ige also held a news conference to also offer a mea culpa.

Sniffen and later Ige walking around the twin disaster area of Kauai’s North Shore and then lava-smacked Pahoa making the public think of Ige not as weak and ineffectual, but as a leader, a commander in time of trouble.

A former newspaper editor with a sharp eye for politics remarked to me the first week of the eruption: “I see Madame Pele has endorsed Ige.”

Last week a state senator, who asked to remain anonymous, told me folks in the Legislature think Ige grew in public perception by doing a capable job of managing the response.

At the same time, sources in Hanabusa’s camp say the poll drop has been a “shot in the arm” for the Waianae Democrat’s campaign. Noticeably, Hanabusa’s TV spots have sharpened, public rallies have been added to her schedule instead of just private coffee hours and her social media has suddenly woken up. Now the once-sure bet is up in the air.

And if Ige does win, it wouldn’t be out of place for him to wrap a bottle of gin in some ti leaves and set it on Halemaumau Crater for the old girl.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.