Two polls show Peskin and Lurie are gaining; what does that mean?

Two new polls  are shaking up the mayor’s race a bit—in part because they show some critical trends that could play out on Election Day.

The Chronicle poll, which is the last the paper plans to do before the election, shows Mayor London Breed at the top (at first) followed by Daniel Lurie—and then Sup. Aaron Peskin in third place and former Sup. Mark Farrell in fourth.

When Farrell is eliminated under ranked-choice voting, his second-place votes mostly go to Lurie. When Peskin is out at the next cut, his second-place votes are split, but Lurie has enough to win.

Then there’s the Peskin campaign poll, which KQED first reported. It shows Peskin and Lurie tied at the top, with Breed in third … and Farrell well behind. Peskin and Lurie each have 25 percent, with Breed at 18 and Farrell at 15.

That poll also shows Lurie getting the most second-place votes.

The news here is that Peskin and Lurie have significantly improved their polling positions from a few months ago, when most of the polls had Breed and Farrell on top, Lurie trailing slightly, and Peskin in fourth. Farrell is dropping, if the polls are accurate, and Breed isn’t gaining or losing much.

That makes a certain amount of sense: The voters know the mayor pretty well, so it’s hard for her to expand her popularity. The more the voters learn about Farrell, apparently, the less they like him.

Lurie and his family have spent $13 million on campaign ads, which is going to have some impact—plus, since he’s never been in office, and the voters don’t know much about him except what they’ve learned from his spending blitz, his favorable ratings are comparatively high.

In the Peskin poll, Breed has a 25 percent favorable rating and a 62 percent unfavorable. Peskin is 34-41. The only candidate with more favorable than unfavorable is Lurie, 44-31.

But as voters, particularly progressive voters who are often later to get, scrutinize, and fill out their ballots, focus on the race, Peskin is seeing a very significant increase in support. None of the polls we see these days are 100 percent accurate, and the top four are still in the margin of error of each other, but by all indications Peskin is moving up faster than anyone else.

The data suggests that the issue of political corruption is starting to get traction. Peskin’s leadership on Prop. C, which would create an inspector general to hold local government accountable, and Lurie’s constant messaging that he’s not an insider and that Breed and Farrell have both had ethics issues may be appealing to swing voters.

Let’s look at some scenarios.

If, indeed, the Peskin poll is accurate, and Peskin and Lurie are the top two candidates, and the data from the Chron poll is accurate in terms of second-place votes, if Farrell comes in number four, and is eliminated in the second round, most of his votes go to Lurie, who will be in first.

But most of Breed’s second-place votes will likely go to Peskin, since the Breed campaign has been attacking Lurie and Farrell.

That might be enough to put Peskin over the top.

In the end, close elections come down to turnout. In the national polls I have seen, Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are both at 48 percent, solid support. Those are folks who aren’t changing their minds. So only four percent of the voters are “undecided,” and most of them, I suspect, don’t like either of the candidates and are likely to stay home.

Unless something very weird happens in the next 15 days, the candidate who wins the presidency will be the one who gets their voters to the polls in the swing states.

That’s going to play out in the local races, too: If it’s this close, voter turnout will be critical, more important than the last-minute attack mail we are going to see.

Full disclosure: Both of my kids work on the Peskin for Mayor campaign.