The 32-year-old Campa Najjar is currently the best positioned on the Democratic side to win the primary election in the summer of 2022.
According to the Public Policy Polling poll released recently, Chula Vista councilman, John McCann, and Ammar Campa-Najjar are substantially ahead of the Chula Vista mayoral contenders and side by side when they compete against each other.
McCann leads Republican hopefuls, and Campa Najjar leads Democrats.
Due to term limits, Mayor Mary Casillas Salas can no longer run again in 2022.
The primary election will be next June, and candidates are preparing for a tough campaign. The election will be in November.
It is the first poll of contenders for the mayoral race of Chula Vista, administered a year before the general election. Although elections will be in 12 months, the current results show that almost half of the voters have formed opinions about the candidates.
If the elections were held today, voters would advance with John McCann as the lone Republican candidate with a 19 percent vote.
With 13 percent of the vote, Ammar Campa Najjar would be the favorite but not the only one among the Democrats.
On the Democratic side, at least two other Latinos are running for mayor; Rudy Ramírez, who currently has 7 percent of the votes, and Jill Gálvez, with 7 percent, in addition to Zaneta Encarnación with 6 percent.
For now, a year before the elections, almost half, 48 percent of those surveyed, are undecided.
When voters were asked in the poll to choose between the leading candidates, John McCann and Ammar Campa Najjar, candidates had 26 percent each, with the remaining 48 percent undecided.
El Cajon resident Ammar Campa Najjar is linked to Chula Vista because he attended Eastlake High School and Southwestern College.
Ammar Campa-Najjar was born in San Diego; his father belongs to an Arab Christian community that had to flee the Middle East because of his religious beliefs and settled in El Cajon.
Ammar speaks only English and Spanish but identifies as a Latino Arab; his maternal grandparents were both from Jalisco, Mexico, and immigrated to the US in the 1940s.
During the Obama administration, he was a legislative aide in the White House and unsuccessfully contested Duncan Hunter and Darrell Issa for Congress with minimal resources.
