Poll: Mayor Ed Lee Dominates Field

Mayor Ed Lee. Get used to it.

The former city bureaucrat and freshman politician is poised to remain as San Francisco mayor for the forseeable future, winning a poll conducted by the Bay Citizen and the University of San Francisco running away.

Lee, 58, who until January's meteoric rise to the city's executive position was City Administrator, is the top choice of 31 percent of the electorate, according to The Bay Citizen/USF poll. And if that weren't enough to make Ed Lee's opponents quake in their collective wingtips, Lee is also a formidable competitor in ranked-choice voting, raking in second-place votes, too, according to the poll.

It should be noted that undecided voters are the second-biggest group of respondents, according to the poll, with 21.1 percent of those polled unsure what to do less than three weeks from now.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera is Ed Lee's top rival, according to the poll, receiving 8.1 percent of votes. John Avalos, the District 11 supervisor and darling of the city's progressive establishment, received 7.4 percent of the poll's top votes. State Sen. Leland Yee was third, with 6.5 percent.

If these results hold true, Ed Lee would win in the ninth round of ranked-choice voting, in which the lowest vote-getter's votes are eliminated, and his or her second- and third-place votes distributed, and this process repeated until one candidate has a majority of votes.

Despite the high percentage of undecided voters and the limits of the poll -- only 11 of the 16 candidates were included -- Lee's advantage "is overwhelming and possibly insurmountable," according to Prof. Corey D. Cook, director of the Leo T. McCarthy Center of Public Service and the Common Good at the University of San Francisco, which conducted the poll.

"Lee’s the clear-cut first choice, but he’s also getting second-place votes from everybody," Cook told the Web site. "No contenders have a chance to catch him in the subsequent tallies — he just wins."

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