Bill De Blasio Leads New York City's Democratic Mayoral Primary, New Poll Shows

New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio leads the Democratic primary field for the city's 2013 mayoral elections, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday.

Among likely Democratic voters, de Blasio took 30 percent of the vote, followed by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at 24 percent, former comptroller Bill Thompson at 22 percent, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) at 10 percent, comptroller John Liu at 6 percent and former council member Sal Albanese at 1 percent. Another 7 percent was undecided.

De Blasio also held the lead in three potential runoff scenarios, beating Quinn by 54 percent to 38 percent, Thompson by 50 percent to 40 percent, and Weiner by a whopping 72 percent to 22 percent.

But voters' choices are hardly set in stone: 34 percent, including 37 percent who backed de Blasio, said there was a good chance they'd change their minds.

While there was little evidence of a gender gap among voters, there was a "measurable racial divide," according to the poll. Thompson led among black voters, with 39 percent, followed by de Blasio and Quinn. Among white voters, de Blasio led with 39 percent, followed by Quinn and then Thompson.

De Blasio's 30 percent is the greatest share of the vote any candidate has attracted so far in polling on the race. In the weeks since Weiner's numbers dropped after new revelations of his inappropriate behavior, most surveys have shown Quinn leading the field, although generally with support in the mid-20s, far below the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

But as shown by HuffPost Pollster's chart, which includes all publicly available polling, de Blasio and Thompson's numbers have also risen.

De Blasio's campaign, until recently mired in the middle of the pack, has been buoyed by improving numbers and a front-page New York Times story.

"I always had faith…when people start to focus, a real progressive impulse was going to come out in the New York City electorate,” de Blasio told Politicker in July, after an earlier poll found him gaining.

De Blasio attracted 40 percent of the city's "very liberal" voters in Tuesday's poll. He has sought to present himself as the campaign's most progressive candidate, as HuffPost's Michael McLaughlin reported Sunday:

For months, de Blasio stumped with bread-and-butter proposals to aid the poor and working class. He appealed to the middle class with a liberal agenda promoting green technology, equality for women in the workplace, and job growth in the tech and entertainment industries. Now, it seemed, his message was breaking through....His campaign rests on the idea that New York is "a tale of two cities," divided between the haves and have-nots. Almost half of the city's population lived in or near poverty in 2011 -- a statistic that de Blasio frequently mentions. The villain in his story is none other than billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The pre-K tax is perhaps the centerpiece of his platform to alleviate economic and racial disparities. But de Blasio, the city's public advocate since 2009, also wants to build affordable housing, rescue hospitals on the verge of closing and reform the police department's controversial stop-and-frisk program.

A judge ruled Monday that the NYPD's use of the stop-and-frisk tactic violated the rights of thousands of New Yorkers.

Sixty percent of likely Democratic voters view the stop-and-frisk program as excessive, while 31 percent find it acceptable, according to Tuesday's poll.

The Quinnipiac poll surveyed 579 likely primary voters by phone between Aug. 7 and 12.

CORRECTION: This post originally misstated the candidates' rankings among white voters.