I just talked to mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan's consultant Jason Bennett about Mallahan's move to the top spot . He attributed the good news for Mallahan in the latest batch of votes to the Nickels negative ad attack against Mallahan.

How does that work?

"We were able to mobilize our supporters for a [get-out-the-vote] phone bank because we were under attack," Bennett says. With 50 volunteers coming in over the weekend-run-up to the Tuesday voting deadline, Team Mallahan made between 12,000 and 15,000 calls.

Nickels is still in third place, this time directly behind Sierra Club activist Mike McGinn, who's now in second place.

Bennett said this is potentially devastating news for Nickels. "He has to see the pattern of [voting] behavior reverse," Bennett said, "but it didn't."

McGinn was a bit more cautious, telling PubliCola, "We'll just keep watching the votes." Although, he added: "The key news in this top-two primary is that we expanded our lead [over third place.]"

We have a call into the Nickels campaign.

UPDATE:

Noting that McGinn's percentage of the vote actually dropped slightly from yesterday's count (by about 0.4 percent) and that Nickels' ticked up slightly (by about 0.7 percent), Nickels spokesman Sandeep Kaushik estimated that if the "trendline" continues—although Nickels would have to actually get more of the votes than McGinn, which he didn't do in today's count—it would "be enough to swing the result our way."  Team Nickels estimates they need to top McGinn by roughly 2 points for that to happen.

Kaushik thought that was possible given the outstanding votes. The elections office counted about 15,000 of the 24,000 Seattle votes that came yesterday and there's about 35,000 more Seattle votes that came in today. And more will trickle in tomorrow.

"It's a waiting game," he said.

[Disclosure: Mallahan's consultant is a freelance comedy columnist for PubliCola. He does not write about the mayor's race nor about local politics. And as we've written many times, Sandeep Kaushik helped co-found PubliCola. He currently has no editorial role  at PubliCola.]