(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The speculation dates back to practically the minute Vincent Gray was free of the nearly five year-long investigation into his 2010 campaign and has only grown louder since he successfully won back his old Ward 7 seat: would Gray challenge Mayor Muriel Bowser for his old job?

If the 74-year-old decides to get back on the ballot, Gray’s former campaign manager, longtime confident, and self-described “soldier in his army” Chuck Thies wants to be ready with a sense of how likely the run would be successful.

“I assume at some point or another, Vince is going is going to ask me ‘How do you feel about this, what’s going on?’ and I want to be prepared to answer that question,” Thies says.

So he created the Marvin Gaye-inspired What’s Going On Political Action Committee to get data that he says wasn’t addressed by a Washington Post poll conducted in June. It found the mayor had a 67 percent approval rating and would beat out Attorney General Karl Racine and Gray in a three-way race.

“There’s a lot of noise in that poll,” Thies says, pointing out that Racine has since decided against a run and it asked registered rather than likely voters. “I’m not saying it’s wrong, but as a tool for someone who works in politics, that poll is not useful.”

So he commissioned Public Policy Polling to call likely voters and ask “If the Democratic candidates for mayor were Muriel Bowser and Vince Gray, who would you vote for?” among several other questions.

One of them asks about a match-up of Bowser versus At-large Councilmember Robert White. Thies explains his reasoning for the question: “Robert ran a long-shot race against a Washington Post-endorsed candidate and toppled an incumbent. He could be mayor someday. There’s no better time to establish a benchmark than the present.”

He expects to receive the results later this week.

Thies says it will cost around $5,000 to execute, and may or may not sway Gray’s ultimate decision. It isn’t the first time, though, that Thies has commissioned a poll to better inform Gray’s potential candidacy.

In the wake of the attorney general’s decision to drop the investigation, Gray was widely rumored to be considering either a bid for the open At-large seat then held by Vincent Orange or challenging his former political protege Yvette Alexander for his old Ward 7 Council seat. Polling showed Gray had a greater advantage in the latter, and he went on to win handily.

That race was also characterized by conjecture about whether Gray planned to use the seat as a springboard back to the mayoralty. In the year since he’s been back on the dais, Gray has certainly often sounded like a man planning a comeback campaign, while simultaneously remaining steadfastly coy about his plans.

“The best I can say is ‘maybe,'” he told DCist at the end of September. “It is something that I am certainly seriously thinking about.”

When he does sit down to make that decision, Thies says he plans to be ready with data at his fingertips, including whether or not likely voters appear to be paying attention to D.C. politics amid what he describes as “the tire fire over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue … which is sucking the air out of the room with regard to local politics all over the country.”

Having all exhausted eyes on the presidential administration is particularly beneficial to incumbents who can coast on name recognition, Thies notes. Yet he has confidence that Gray could have a fighting chance against Bowser.

“I believe that every election that involves two qualified candidates can be contested and the outcome is not predetermined,” Thies says. “It’s never easy to unseat an incumbent, but Vince has done it before. As a matter of fact, he has three electoral victories against incumbents… There aren’t a lot of people who have that record: four victories, and three of them are against incumbents.”