A poll conducted two weeks ago found Portland City Council candidates Jo Ann Hardesty and Loretta Smith are about even, but it's unclear if that result is holding as Election Day nears.

Smith's campaign paid for the poll, conducted by Patinkin Research Strategies. The company surveyed 400 randomly selected likely voters in Portland by land line and cell phone on Oct. 17 and Oct. 18, according to a company memo provided by the Smith campaign.

Forty percent of people surveyed said they plan to vote for Hardesty and 39 percent for Smith, the memo said. Twenty-two percent said they were undecided.

That indicated Hardesty's lead was within the margin of error, meaning she could pull off a larger win or loss to Smith than the one percentage point difference identified by the Patinkin poll. The high share of voters undecided on a candidate at that stage of the campaign added to the uncertainty about the poll's implications.

The Smith campaign declined Thursday to release the full polling data. That information is useful for evaluating a pollster's assumptions about who is likely to vote and to examine whether respondents were asked leading questions.

Patinkin Research president Ben Patinkin said poll respondents were asked standard questions about their voting habits and education, as well as whether they had heard of the candidates, how favorably they viewed each of them and whom they would pick in a head-to-head vote.

John Horvick, vice president and political director at local polling firm DHM Research, said Patinkin is a credible pollster. But he said he would view the Smith-Hardesty poll with skepticism due to the limited data about it.

Patinkin said he's confident the poll was accurate when it was conducted two weeks ago, but whether the results hold is "hard to say."

Even so, the data suggests Smith has gained significant ground since finishing 25 percentage points behind Hardesty in the primary election.

Hardesty spokeswoman Anna Nguyen said her candidate isn't concerned about Smith's poll, and repeated a saying that the only poll that matters is the result on Election Day. As of Thursday morning, 28.5 percent of registered Multnomah County voters had returned their ballots to the county elections office.

"We've been working just as hard and as smart as we always have, and we plan to finish out the next six days that way," Nguyen said.

– Gordon R. Friedman

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