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Timing

In elections, as in life, it’s all about timing.

“There’s certainly an emotional peak, you can call it a ‘messaging peak,’ it’s also just known as the candidate ‘peaking,’” says Jake Dilemani, a political consultant at the Parkside Group. “A campaign doesn’t want to peak too early because the voters aren’t paying too much attention until the last several weeks.”

Many candidates in the race for New York City mayor have been pacing themselves carefully to that rule. That’s why we’re only just now seeing vigorous signs of life for Bill Thompson, whose passivity in courting voters has been puzzling pundits for a while.

But in a revealing remark that emerged on Sunday, Thompson hinted that his relative apathy had not been unintended.

“The one thing about successful campaigns, the ones that do well and win, is that if you peak at the middle of July you’re not going to win,” Thompson said. “You want a campaign that builds and grows, that builds up the excitement and energy.”

That same day, the placid candidate unleashed an unusually passionate speech on race, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices, and the recent killing of Trayvon Martin, in which Thompson, who is African American, referred to himself as “the son of the struggle before me.” His stand has made headlines ever since.

Meanwhile a rival candidate, City Council Speaker Quinn, has just made her first explicit move to snag women’s votes, by cleverly redirecting the nonstop question of whether Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer should get a second shot at voters’ trust.

“Let’s not have a conversation about second chances,” Quinn said Tuesday on CNN. “Let’s have a conversation about the potential for first chances and history and what that could mean for the greater city in the world,” she said, not so subtly referring to her bid to be New York City’s first female and first openly gay mayor.

The fact that she waited until just eight weeks before Primary Day to make an explicit pitch for votes based on her gender did not go unnoticed.

Another sign of campaigns are angling to reach their peak at just the right moment is that they are holding off on media spending — so far.

But that dam is now breaking. Candidates have given signs that they are moving on that front too. John Catsimatidis and Anthony Weiner both kicked off a new wave of campaign ads yesterday. Quinn aired a first ad just two weeks ago.

Next stop: your mailbox, which Dilemani promises will be stuffed with campaign literature any day now.