New Poll Finds San Diego Mayoral Candidates Neck And Neck

Speaker 1: 00:00 New polling for races in the city of San Diego finds the battle for mayor is still almost neck and neck between Democrats, Todd, Gloria, and Barbara Bray. The new numbers from the San Diego union Tribune, 10 news survey USA poll. Also give an indication which way voters are leaning on city measures that would increase housing for the homeless and establish a new police review board. Joining me is San Diego union Tribune reporter David Garrick. Hi, David. Welcome. I'm ready. Thanks for having me. Is there a clear leader in the San Diego mayor's race? Speaker 2: 00:36 Uh, no. And the, in the latest poll we've done Todd glory as a head of Barbara re 39% to 38%, but that's well within the 5.3% margin of error. So it's basically a dead heat or as close as I can get to a dead. Speaker 1: 00:49 Where is breeze support coming from? Speaker 2: 00:51 It was already more so among Republicans and independence, and that seems to fit because she seems to be taking some more centrists and Republican friendly positions. And that's something that she sort of had to do because she was the underdog in this race and she's running against a fellow Democrat. So, you know, taking similar to positions to him, doesn't help you when you're an underdog Speaker 1: 01:12 And who's supporting Gloria Speaker 2: 01:14 More of your hardcore Democrats. He's been endorsed by the San Diego County democratic party, despite the fact that he and Bree are both Democrats, they chose him. And he's also getting more support in recent days from a young people, uh, and Latinos, which he he's a native American, Latino and Filipino. Uh, and he was actually leading with Latino voters in our last poll. But now he's leading with Latino voters. So that's sort of been a surge for him. Speaker 1: 01:38 Now, this mayor's poll finds almost a quarter of the voters polled still undecided. So does it seem the race really could go either way? Speaker 2: 01:47 It does. Yeah. 23, 24% are undecided with only four weeks left and voting is actually underway. So, uh, and it's hard to know how those voters are going to go, especially with two Democrats. You don't know are a lot of those late voters Democrats. I mean, typically they are. And so it's, it's a Republican versus Democrat race. You can guess where they're going to go, but here we have two Democrats. So it's very hard to guess where those votes will go. Speaker 1: 02:09 You know, speaking of undecideds, the poll finds a full 50% of voters undecided in the race for city attorney, that race pits, incumbent city attorney Mara Elliott against challenger Corey Briggs. Who's ahead in that poll. Speaker 2: 02:23 Uh, Elliot is ahead, but her lead is shrunk on our last poll. She was 10 points ahead. And now it's down to six points, which is just barely larger than that margin of error. I keep mentioning a 5.3%. One thing interesting to note is that Briggs has made inroads with Republicans. They're both Democrats also in the city attorney race, but breaks is a, in a support among Republicans has been increasing. Speaker 1: 02:42 Now, when it comes to the measures facing San Diego voters, the polling is not looking good for measure a, can you remind us what measure a would do? Speaker 2: 02:51 Yeah. Measure, Hey is a $900 million housing bond. It's really designed to sort of a local solution to homelessness and an effort for San Diego to get it sort of fair share of state money because a LA and San Francisco I've passed bonds like this. And so they're getting a huge amount of state money. Uh, anyway, it's a housing bond, uh, and it would build housing for homeless people. Uh, but the poll shows that it needs to third support and the poll shows that's not close to that, but it's barely ahead about five points ahead and it needs to be much farther ahead than that, to have any chance of reaching two-thirds on election day Speaker 1: 03:22 And measure B, which would give more power to a police misconduct oversight panel. That one seems to be doing well with city voters. Speaker 2: 03:32 Yeah. Beyond, well, I would call it a lock. If I were a gambler, I would, I would be willing to bet on it. It's leaning up 53% to 21% and it only needs a simple majority. So I would say that's a that's as good as a, as approved. Speaker 1: 03:44 And how are the two other measures on the city ballot polling? Speaker 2: 03:48 Uh, yeah. Well measure E is the really interesting ones. That's the one that's to raise the height limit near the sports arena, which could allow a new sports community to be built and would allow sort of intense housing around the sports arena area, which a lot of people feel is a, our area, right? For, for redevelopment that is leading in our poll by 12 points. And the poll we did a month ago, it was only leading by two points, which seems to indicate that the more people are hearing about the proposal, the more they're liking it. I mean, it hard to say for sure, but that's what it seems to indicate. Uh, and if that passes that that's a game changer for the sports arena area, the other one was with the school district. It changed the school district voting for at-large district by district. That also looks like it's going to pass. It's leading, but there's a lot of people who are undecided on that one. So it's not, not for sure. Speaker 1: 04:31 Now, David, there were questions raised about the methodology and accuracy of the last survey USA poll on local races. What can you tell us about whether that was corrected and what the best practices are to ensure a polling data is as accurate as possible? Speaker 2: 04:47 Yeah. You know, it's a complicated thing, especially in the world where people have more cell phones in the old days when people would do these polls, everyone had a landline. So the shift of people to cell phones has created some more uncertainty and confusion about, are you getting a representative sample on a swath of, of the population? I'm not a statistician and I'm not an expert, but I know those are some of the key issues. Uh, the criticism of last month survey USA, 10 news union Tribune poll was that there weren't enough independence and the poll independence or Tripoli about 30% of the local electorate. And in that one, I think it was 18%. Uh, this poll was better. It was about 23%. Uh, but when I talked to the head of the polling company, he said, they didn't really do anything differently to try to make that number better. Speaker 2: 05:29 It just got better on its own. Uh, and the other criticism of the poll one month ago was that there were too many likely voters out of the folk surveyed. Uh, that number was like 90 something percent, which does seem enormously high. Uh, this time it was lower. And, uh, I talked to the polling company guy and he said that was something that they did make happen. They were sorta more aggressively streaming folks, instead of just asking them when they were being surveyed, are you likely to vote? They asked them other questions about, well, how do you plan to vote? Do you plan to vote just to sort of figure out exactly what the person's plans were. And then during the course of doing that, they realized some folks who had maybe identified themselves as a likely voter, maybe weren't really a likely voter. And so that number shrunk down to a more common, common result that you would expect to see. Speaker 1: 06:13 Okay. Then I've been speaking with San Diego union Tribune, reporter David Garrick. David, thank you so much. Thanks for your time.