Salt Lake mayoral race is a tossup

The primary election for Salt Lake mayor is a tossup — with three top contenders so closely bunched that which two of them advances to the final November election will be the pair who gets their supporters to the polls, a public opinion survey shows.

A new poll for the Deseret Morning News and KSL-TV by Dan Jones & Associates shows that individual support for Jenny Wilson, Dave Buhler and Ralph Becker falls within the survey's margin of error.

"It's a horse race. Any two of the three" could go into the final campaign, said Jones, who has polled in Utah for more than 30 years.

The nine-member field will be winnowed to two on Tuesday. The final election is Nov. 6.

"We did notice that the last two nights (of polling) Becker came up" in the competition, Jones said. So the Utah House minority leader seems to have some momentum.

Still in fourth place, even though he has out-raised the other three in campaign funds, is Keith Christensen.

Wilson, Buhler, Becker and Christensen have always been the four top candidates among the nine who filed, both in money raised, money spent and polling support.

But while previous surveys showed Wilson and Buhler as the top two candidates, now Becker has joined them, Jones found in polling 500 Salt Lake City voters this week.

The new survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percent, which means the numbers in support of Wilson, Buhler and Becker are all within the margin of error. Any of the three could be first, second or third.

Jones found that if the primary election were today, Wilson gets 26 percent support from registered voters; Buhler is at 24 percent and Becker is at 22 percent.

Christensen is at 12 percent, about where he was in the newspaper's last survey in July.

The other candidates fall off in the new poll. Surgeon J.P. Hughes, who now has a TV ad running, gets 2 percent support. John Renteria gets 1 percent, while Rainer Huck, Quinn Cady McDonough and Robert "Lot" Muscheck don't get 1 percent support.

Eleven percent told Jones that they didn't know who they may vote for, while 2 percent mentioned someone else who won't be on the primary ballot.

Buhler is making his second run for the mayorship. Buhler, a former GOP state senator who has been on the City Council for eight years, got into the 1991 final mayoral race but lost to former Mayor Deedee Corradini.

The rest are running for mayor for the first time.