Who would win if the election were held today?

The race is a statistical tie with no clear winner. Using current polling, London Breed wins with just 50.99% in the final round of ranked choice voting (RCV)—but this victory is within the 3.1% margin of error and ignores the 18% of voters who are still undecided.

Compared to May's mayoral poll that showed 28% undecided, this month's poll showing 18% undecided indicates that voters are starting to line up behind candidates.

Daniel Lurie is consolidating 2nd rank votes, growing his share from just 14% in May, to 22% today. The next-biggest change is the surge in 1st rank votes for Mark Farrell - growing from just 16% in May to 21% in July. Mayor Breed has mostly stayed put, with her first rank votes increasing within the margin of error from 21% to 24%, and her second rank votes just edging past the margin of error to grow from 6% to 10%.

San Francisco's ranked choice voting system means voters can rank more than one candidate in order of preference. To simulate this, we asked voters who they would vote for if the election were held today, and who they would rank in second, third, and fourth place.

About the poll: GrowSF commissioned FM3 Research to run a citywide poll of 1,066 San Francisco voters from July 9 to July 18, 2024. The results have a ±3.1% margin of error at the 95% confidence level.

Our poll question

To learn second, third, and fourth place rankings we asked follow-up questions "Who, if anyone, is your second/third/fourth choice for Mayor?". If the respondent indicated they were undecided or unsure, we asked, "Would you lean toward one of the other candidates or would you have no second choice?". If they responded that they'd have no second choice, we ended the question and moved on.

Candidate names were presented in random order to each respondent to avoid order bias.

How each round of voting plays out

GrowSF built a ranked choice voting simulator to model the election. The simulator uses the poll data to simulate how votes transfer from one candidate to another in each round of RCV.

Note: "Exhausted" votes are ballots where all the ranked candidates were eliminated. These ballots won't be counted in subsequent rounds.

How do votes transfer in the first round?

This table shows how votes transfer from one candidate to another.

For example, look at Mark Farrell's row. 10% of Farrell's voters rank London Breed as second choice, an astonishing 71% rank Daniel Lurie, 5% rank Aaron Peskin, 5% rank Ahsha Safai, and 9% don't make a second choice at all.

The other big stand-out number is that 31% of London Breed voters only vote for her and don't rank any other candidates (this is called "bullet voting"). This might be because the race is so far out and the other candidates' name recognition is low, but if it carries forward to November, this high number of bullet votes would mean these voters would lose out on a chance to have their voices heard should Breed not make it to the top two in the final round.