Is it the Kamala effect? Whatever it may be, Mayor London Breed is up by eight points in the five-way race for mayor, according to the latest poll from the Chronicle, but ranked-choice voting could scramble these results entirely.

The conventional wisdom in November’s San Francisco mayoral race has been that Mayor London Breed has a terrible approval rating, and therefore is very much in danger of being voted out. A late January poll showed Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie ahead by a whopping 18 points (though that poll was commissioned by the Daniel Lurie campaign), while a more independent Chronicle poll in February showed former SF supervisor and one-time interim mayor Mark Farrell edging Mayor Breed by two points.


That conventional wisdom may need a complete reset. We have another independent poll today from the Chronicle, conducted between July 31 and August 5, showing that London Breed has an eight-point lead among SF voters for their first-choice vote. Breed gets 28% of the vote for the first choice, white Farrell only gets 20%, and the rest further behind.    

“For whatever reason — changes in city policies (or) outcomes, the weather, national politics — Breed has gotten herself up off the canvas,” Jonathan Brown, president of the agency Sextant Strategies & Research that conducted the poll, told the Chronicle.


The poll showed the following results for SF voters’ first-choice votes:

  • London Breed - 28%
  • Mark Farrell - 20%
  • Daniel Lurie - 17%
  • Aaron Peskin - 12%
  • Ahsha Safai - 5%


This is the first major independent poll since Supervisor Aaron Peskin jumped into the race (though there have been other recent partisan polls), and the results are not great for Peskin. They’re even worse for Supervisor Ahsha Safai, though both can take some hope that 18% of SF voters said they were still undecided.


But as Lurie notes above, this is a ranked-choice voting election, and Lurie leads all candidates in the second-choice category with 22%. Farrell is close behind him with 20% of the second-choice vote (and he’s spinning these results hard too, as seen below), followed by Breed (12%), Safai (10%), and Peskin (8%).


The poll did not ask about voters’ third- and fourth-choice picks, and those may turn out to be significant in a close five-way race. And as the Chronicle pointed out last month, voters will be able to select as many as ten candidates (!) in November's mayoral race.

Related: New Poll Shows Mark Farrell Beating London Breed in First-Choice Vote, and Breed Trailing In Ranked-Choice [SFist]

Image: @LondonBreed via Twitter