Mike's on a roll in poll

Figures show him flattening Fred

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF

The race for City Hall is quickly becoming a race for second place - both in the general mayoral election and in the Democratic primary, a new poll shows.

Mayor Bloomberg would wallop all comers, including front-running Democrat Fernando Ferrer, who trails the mayor, 52% to 36%, according to the Quinnipiac University poll.

The only good news for Ferrer is that he seems to be separating from the Democratic pack, enjoying twice as much support as his closest rival, Virginia Fields.

If the primary were today, Ferrer would snag 33% of the Democratic vote, up from 27% in May - a low point driven by his comment that the 1999 police shooting of immigrant Amadou Diallo was not a crime.

Fields' support, meanwhile, has dropped to just 16%, from a high of 23% in May. Fields, the race's only African-American, appears to be suffering for her campaign's decision to paste Asian faces into a flyer to project an image of broader support.

She now barely leads City Council Speaker Gifford Miller (D-Manhattan), who had his best showing to date at 15%, and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Queens, Brooklyn), who dropped to 11% from 12% in June.

"Her campaign hasn't jelled, she doesn't have a lot of money and the flap over her mail didn't help," said Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, explaining Fields' free fall.

"Should the trend continue," added Sheinkopf, who is not working for any candidate, "Freddy Ferrer could win this primary without a runoff."

Beating Bloomberg is another matter. The poll found that Bloomberg would crush his Democratic rivals in head-to-head matchups by 15 percentage points or more - an electoral landslide.

The mayor's support appears to be broad and deep, with a majority of voters in every borough and ethnic group - including a solid 59% of blacks - approving of his performance, the poll showed.

"He's got a zillion dollars, he's the mayor and there's a lot of things happening in the city that are pluses for him," Quinnipiac pollster Maurice Carroll said.

A full 57% of voters said they had seen one of the mayor's ads, although most said the spots made little difference to them.

The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.