Bill Peduto put some distance between himself and his chief rival, Jack Wagner, in the latest numbers from Keystone Analytics, the Harrisburg firm doing the only outside polling in the Pittsburgh mayor's race.

Mr. Peduto led Mr. Wagner, 39 percent to 32 percent, in the survey of 404 Democrats deemed likely to vote in the May 21 primary.  State Rep. Jake Wheatley had 8 percent and A.J. Richardson, the Sheraden community activist, had 1 percent and 20 percent were either undecided or refused to answer.

Mr. Peduto had a smaller lead in the firm's last survey in late April.  His two-point lead then was within the survey's 4.9 percent margin of error. In a release accompanying the survey, the Harrisburg consultants noted that the negative advertising in the race had clearly had an effect, bruising the favorability ratings of both of the leading candidates.

Fifty-one percent of the voters said they held a favorable view of the councilman,  and 49 percent were favorable toward Mr. Wagner.  In the firm's last survey, those positive numbers had been 65  percent and 64 percent respectively.

The sample was 57 percent female and 43 percent male.  And like the typical Pittsburgh primary voter,  it skewed to the older end of the population.  Seven percent of the respondents were between 18 and 34; 17 percent between 35 and 49; 37 percent between 50 and 64; and 39 percent were 65 or older. The phone calls were conducted on May 8.

One week to go.

In case you missed it Jim O'Toole had a story Sunday on the small policy differences among the three major Democratic candidates for the Pittsburgh mayor's job.

On key issues such as municipal finance and reform of the scandal-battered police department, the differences among them amount to nuances rather than dramatic, polarizing fissures.

In one sense, that's not surprising. They're all Democrats. And the three leading contenders have first-hand experience with the practical realities of politics on the fifth floor of the City-County Building where council and mayoral offices line opposite hallways.

In the same paper I trailed Jack Wagner and Bill Peduto for a few hours (I failed to meet up with Jake Wheatley despite two attempts) and found them trying to appeal to core voters. Wagner met with fellow veterans in a bid to cold-call 10,000 military voters and their families over the next week. The Peduto team is taking a different, more targeted tack:

After attending a Mother's Day rally against gun violence at a Baptist church in East Liberty and a street fair in Friendship, he and a campaign staffer scrambled across the city to Carrick to knock on prospective voter doors. But not just any doors: Ten days away from an election is a bit late to start courting all voters, so his campaign had lists of addresses known to be either supporting him or undecided. Even though most houses on hilly Kirk Avenue are owned by Democrats, if they were judged to be firmly supporting Wagner or Wheatley, their doors were skipped.

The primary is expected to be a close one and Mr. Peduto, 48, underscored that in his messages to voters, urging them to call him personally if they had questions about attacks on his record aired in commercials by Mr. Ravenstahl and Mr. Wagner.

"All this stuff on TV is the goofiness of politics," he told a young mother of four. "Give me a chance to address it. All of it is factually incorrect."

Photos, top to bottom: Jack Wagner and vets/Rebecca Droke. Bill Peduto in Strip District/Michael Henninger. Jake Wheatley at mayoral forum/Julia Rendleman.

Happy Monday Early Returners. Here's a handful of links to get your week started. 

1. Not to toot our own horn (toot, toot), but the Post-Gazette's Sunday paper was a true masterpiece. First, check out Kate Giammirise's piece on why there are so few women in state politics, with women holding just 17.8 percent of seats in the the General Assembly. As an aside, Pittsburgh City Council fares a little better, with three women (including the council president) out of nine holding seats. 

2. Not politics related, but Mark Roth's series on former football players with brain disease is phenomenal. The series started Sunday.

3. Higher ed reporter Bill Schackner reports that former Penn State president Graham Spanier received the highest compensation package among university presidents in 2011-2012. Hopefully that massive severance package will help off-set his legal fees. 

4. Mayor Luke Ravenstahl made Sports Illustrated, and no, not for his brief career as a silver screen place kicker. Unfortunately, there's no link here, but here's an excerpt from the cover story about Sidney Crosby:

Pittsburgh has been disappointed lately by the behavior of other young stars-most famously, Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, but also 33-year-old mayor Luke Ravenstahl, who took office at 26 and who recently dropped his re-election bid amid a federal investigation into police spending. (Last week Ravenstahl responded to an unfavorable story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with a rant in the newspaper's online comments section. The highlight: "It's actually laughable to think that you print your newspaper everyday [sic] with a straight face.")

5. And finally, ICYMI, a story that broke late Friday. Rich Lord and I report that the mayor's house received an upgrade from a company related to contractor that did millions in work for the city. It's not the first time the Post-Gazette has inquired about the mayor's abode. In December, Brian O'Neill dared to ask where the mayor lives.

The P-G's Rob Rogers today takes on the unique sentencing of Joan Orie Melvin for public corruption. Judge Lester Nauhaus is set to make a technical but not substantive correction to his sentence of house arrest (with orders to send apologies to judges statewide) tomorrow.