BOSTON -- Mayor Tom Menino looks around the elevator and reaches instinctively for the hand of the only person in the car he's never met.

"Where are you from?" he asks the young man.

"Somerville," the young man replies.

It's hard to see how Tom Menino won't secure a history-making fifth term as Boston's mayor after yesterday's preliminary election--held to narrow the four candidate field down to two--in which he won a resounding 50.5 percent of the vote.

In May, The Boston Globe conducted a poll to find out what Bostonians think of their city's mayor, Tom Menino. Most of the questions were common to public-opinion surveys about elected officials: Do you approve or disapprove of the way he is doing his job? Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him? But there was one question that seemed out of place, as if the Globe's pollsters had gotten their scripts mixed up and, rather than asking about a big-city mayor, were instead inquiring about a bucolic New England town selectman: "Have you, personally, ever met" Menino?