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SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake City Councilwoman Erin Mendenhall is leading Sen. Luz Escamilla by a fairly healthy margin, according to a new UtahPolicy.com and Y2Analytics poll released Thursday.
The poll showed Mendenhall has a 13-point lead among likely Salt Lake City voters, with 46% saying if the election were held today they would vote for Mendenhall, compared to 33% for Escamilla.
But the poll also showed 20% said they hadn’t yet decided — and candidates are still predicting a much closer race.
“It’s certainly encouraging,” she said Thursday. “The momentum and diversity of support are really great to see, but these numbers are not consistent with what we’re seeing at the doors. This election is going to be much closer than this. Much closer. I’m much more focused on earning votes than winning polls and we are going to keep working just as hard to earn every single vote we can over these final days.”
Escamilla’s campaign manager, Rudy Miera, said their calculations are showing different returns.
“While we see a similar number of undecided voters, our internal numbers show a very different picture in terms of support,” he said. “We’re confident when the election is over, the final numbers will show a much tighter election. We’re getting great feedback on the ground and are going to keep running the same GOTV campaign that pushed us over the top in advancing past the primary.”
Thursday’s poll comes a day after the Salt Lake Chamber released a separate poll conducted by Dan Jones & Associates that showed Mendenhall has only a slight lead over Sen. Luz Escamilla — but that poll had a much smaller sample size than UtahPolicy.com and Y2Analytics’ poll, as well as a less recent polling time frame.
Thursday’s poll was of 745 likely registered voters “strictly” from Salt Lake City, said Kelly Patterson of Y2Analytics. The poll, an email survey, was conducted from Oct. 16 to Oct. 22. Its margin of error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. The chamber’s poll, of 350 respondents, began almost two weeks earlier, from Oct. 3 to Oct. 10.
Related:
Poll: Erin Mendenhall has slight lead on Luz Escamilla in Salt Lake City mayor’s race
Salt Lake City Councilwoman Erin Mendenhall has a slight lead over Sen. Luz Escamilla in the race to become Salt Lake’s next mayor, according to a new poll of likely voters released Wednesday.Patterson noted that even more significant than Mendenhall’s 13-point lead is her 10-point lead after poll respondents answered how certain they were about their vote and undecided voters were pushed to answer which way they were leaning.
In total, 53% said they would “definitely,” “probably” or were leaning toward voting for Mendenhall, while 43% said they would “definitely,” “probably” or were learning toward voting for Escamilla, the poll states.
More specifically, 31% said they would “definitely” vote for Mendenhall, 14% said they would “probably” vote for Mendenhall, and 8% said they were leaning toward voting for her. That’s compared to 20% who said they would “definitely” vote for Escamilla, 13% would “probably” vote for her, and 10% said they were leaning toward voting for her. About 4% said they were still undecided or not voting.
“It seems to indicate that Councilwoman Mendenhall is in a strong position going into the last week of the campaign,” Patterson said. “It’s always better to be up by 10 than to be down by 10.”
The poll comes after Mendenhall took a surprise lead in the August primary, even though previous polls put former state Sen. Jim Dabakis as a front-runner. Dabakis eventually faltered to Escamilla after more ballots were counted days later.
