NEW YORK — Police Commissioner Ray Kelly may not be invincible after all.
The city’s top cop would lose the mayor’s race to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, as well as the two other Democratic candidates for mayor, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll out Thursday.
The poll shows Quinn blowing Kelly out of the water in a head-to-head showdown, securing 48 percent of the vote, versus 33 percent for Kelly, if the 2013 election were held today.
Kelly, who has the highest approval rating of any city official, would also lose by double-digits to former City Comptroller Bill Thompson and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, the poll found. Both would top him 46 percent versus 34 percent.
The poll did not match Kelly against other presumptive candidates, including Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, embattled City Comptroller John Liu or media exec Tom Allon, who has discussed potentially running on the Republican ticket.
"Ray Kelly is a great police commissioner, and he’d be a good mayor, New Yorkers think — but it’s still a Democratic town," said Quinnipiac University Polling Institute director Maurice Carroll, who noted that while Kelly is popular among Republicans, he trails considerably with Dems.
Carroll also said more than half of voters polled continue to think Kelly might run — despite him saying repeatedly that he has no plans to run for office after serving out his term.
And while Quinn remains the odds-on favorite in the Democratic primary, with support from 26 percent of those polled, Carroll warned that there was still wiggle room, since more than one-third of voters remain undecided in the race.
"The leader in this early look," he said, “remains: ‘don’t know.’”
The poll also found that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s approval rating is down again, sliding to 49 percent from 54 percent in March, with deep disapproval of his handling of schools.
Kelly, meanwhile, enjoyed an approval rating of 60 percent.
The poll of 1,066 registered voters, which was conducted from May 3-8, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
