Barely a week after he officially entered the Democratic primary for the mayoralty of New York City, Anthony Weiner has reason to be cheerful. On Tuesday, a Marist College poll showed the recovering sex-tweeter running second to Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker. And the media is suddenly taking Weiner seriously. Politico’s Maggie Haberman, after spending some time with the former congressman on the stump, reports that he “bears an uncanny resemblance to the pugnacious, hard-charging Anthony Weiner of old.” According to the headline on his post, Salon’s political editor Blake Zeff believes that “Anthony Weiner can actually win the NYC mayor race.”

Evidently, failing to have acknowledged a character flaw is proving a handicap to the other candidates, including Bill Thompson, the former city comptroller who ran Mike Bloomberg a close second in the 2009 general election; the public advocate Bill de Blasio; and John Liu, the current comptroller. In the new poll, none of them got more than twelve per cent. Weiner received nineteen per cent, and Quinn, widely regarded as the favorite, got twenty-four per cent. To avoid a run-off, the leading candidate has to get at least forty per cent of the vote.

Now, getting nineteen per cent of the potential vote three months before the primary election, scheduled for September 10th, is hardly cause for booking a victory celebration. But for Weiner it represents an encouraging start. As Zeff and others have pointed out, he entered the race with a number of advantages, including name recognition, money—more than five million dollars left over from previous campaigns—a divided opposition, and an affinity with the base of the Democratic Party. The big unknown was the crotch-shot factor. Would New Yorkers be willing to overlook his scandalous fall from Congress? According to the Marist poll, at least, the answer is yes. Fifty-nine per cent of registered Democrats said he deserved another chance, and fifty-three per cent of all registered voters said the same thing.

Interestingly, the breakdown of the poll showed that New Yorkers living in the outer boroughs, where mayoral elections are usually decided, were more willing to countenance a Weiner candidacy than voters in Manhattan. In the Bronx, sixty-one per cent said he deserved a second chance. In Manhattan, the figure was forty-eight per cent. Numbers like this suggest Weiner’s comeback story could catch on not just with ardent Democrats but with the electorate at large. If God loves a repentant sinner, so do the voters, especially those of modest means.

That’s the potential upside for Weiner. The downside comes in two parts. First, there’s always the possibility that the Twitter ruckus will come back to bite him. And even if it doesn’t, there are questions about his track record, and his lack of experience in running anything nearly as complex as a major city. Of the two concerns, I think the second may be the biggest threat to Weiner’s hopes.

Given that a decision to enter the race was always going to lead to a media circus, it’s probably fair to assume that Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, who is helping to shape his campaign, have considered the possibility of more salacious details appearing. But when it comes to ambitious politicians and sex scandals, you just never know. In an interview last month with a local television station in Rye, Weiner said, “If reporters want to go try to find more, I can’t say that they’re not going to be able to find another picture, or find another … person who may want to come out on their own. But I’m not going to contribute to that.”

That last bit is understandable. Still, you can bet your last George Washington that the metro desks of the New York Post and Daily News are on the case, as are one or more opposition research crews. Even if one of the diggers comes up with something, though, it won’t necessarily destroy Weiner’s campaign—not unless the discovery differs significantly from what we learned in June, 2011, about his online proclivities. And Weiner seems confident that any new revelations won’t meet that standard. “The basics of the story are not gonna change,” he said in the same television interview.

As this stage, Weiner’s rivals can’t simply assume that the aura of scandal will sink his campaign. That doesn’t mean they can’t attack him and do some damage, though. But rather than ask whether he’s fit to be mayor—a question they will largely leave to the media—the other candidates are likely to focus on whether he’s qualified to run a city of more than eight million people.

On that, even a charitable reading of the record suggests that Weiner will have some persuading to do. As a young Brooklyn city councilman, from 1992 to 1998, he was a diligent constituent representative and a publicity seeker. But putting troubled local kids to work cleaning up graffiti and persuading the city to repaint the stairwells of its housing developments—two achievements he listed on his congressional Web site—hardly compares with leading the City Council (Quinn), managing the seven-hundred-member staff in the comptroller’s office (Thompson and Liu), or acting as the city’s primary public watchdog (de Blasio).

As the congressman for New York’s ninth district, which is carved out of Brooklyn and Queens, Weiner served with his trademark energy and ferocity, but he was largely removed from local debates on things like education, transport, and crime. At a mayoral forum this week, Sal Albanese, a veteran council member from Brooklyn who is also in the Democratic field, poked fun at Weiner for having just entered the dispute about charter schools and testing, which, for many Democratic voters and interest groups, are key issues. A twenty-page policy booklet that Weiner’s campaign recently posted online, titled “Keys to the City: 64 Ways to Keep New York the Capital of the Middle Class,” hardly mentions them.

Then there is the question of whether Weiner would be an effective administrator and leader, something Bloomberg has built his mayoralty on. Congressmen don’t run much except their own offices, and, even in that modest endeavor, Weiner was hardly known as a great manager. According to a 2008 story in the Times, his office was a revolving door, as staff members came and went, many of them alienated by his abrasive manner and his temper tantrums.

To be sure, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani were hardly known as nurturers, and neither is Bloomberg. Weiner’s harsh edges could conceivably work to his advantage. New Yorkers like having a tough guy (or gal) in City Hall. But they also want one who has shown enough to suggest that he (or she) could run the city. In the weeks and months ahead, meeting that test will be Weiner’s biggest challenge.

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty.