PORTLAND, Ore. — A new poll shows Portland mayoral candidate Keith Wilson making rapid gains in the race, with the businessman and political outsider leaping ahead of all of three current city commissioners running against him. The poll was conducted by DHM Research and commissioned and published by The Oregonian/OregonLive.
The Nov. 5 election will be Portland's first using ranked-choice voting. Residents will be asked to rank their top six choices out of the 19 candidates running for mayor. The winner is decided by eliminating the worst-performing candidate and reassigning their votes to each voter's next-highest choice, repeating the process until one candidate gets more than 50% of the votes.
The poll used an abbreviated version of the same tallying method, asking those surveyed to rank their top three choices out of six options: the race's five frontrunners and "some other candidate."
Commissioner Rene Gonzalez took an initial lead with 23% of respondents ranking him first. Wilson was in second with 18%, followed by Commissioner Carmen Rubio with 11%, Commissioner Mingus Mapps with 10%, mayoral candidate Liv Osthus with 4% and "some other candidate" with 1%.
The rank order remained unchanged when Osthus and then Mapps were eliminated, but Rubio's elimination after Round 3 left Wilson with 53% of the vote to Gonzalez's 47%, making him the poll winner.
The second- and third-ranked choices hint at what happened; although Gonzalez got the largest number of first-choice votes, his popularity as a second- or third-choice pick was in the single digits. Mapps was the most popular second choice, followed by Wilson, and Wilson was the most popular third choice.
Rubio supporters in particular moved heavily over to Wilson as their second choice, The Oregonian reported. She reached a peak of 25% of the votes in Round 3, and once she was eliminated, nearly three out of every four of those votes transferred to Wilson, catapulting him ahead of Gonzalez.
The largest number of respondents — 32% — said they didn't know who they'd rank first, and many respondents also didn't fill out the full rankings, according to The Oregonian, with almost two-thirds saying they didn't have a third choice.
The survey also asked respondents whether they approved or disapproved of each of the commissioners' current work in city hall. Mapps had both the highest approval rating and the lowest disapproval rating, although all three had net-negative favorability. Gonzalez had both a higher approval rating and a higher disapproval rating than Rubio.
The poll surveyed a representative sample of 300 adult Portland residents, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.7 percentage points.
The poll was published one day after KGW and The Oregonian/OregonLive hosted a mayoral debate featuring Wilson, Gonzalez, Rubio, Mapps and Osthus, but the survey was conducted from Oct. 9 to Oct. 13, so it does not reflect any voters' reactions to the debate.
Missed the debate? You can catch the whole thing below and streaming on KGW+, the free Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV app:
