New York's Democratic Rural Conference opens Friday in Ithaca, and the attention-getter will be the conference's straw polls.

It will be the first beauty contest between Eliot Spitzer and Tom Suozzi in the governor's race. Spitzer, who has been campaigning for months, should be favored by a wide margin.

(Note: While a link is provided, above, to Spitzer's web site, the site was actually down as of 7:15 a.m. this morning. They may be trying to fix a few things.)