CHICAGO – The idea that Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis could be elected mayor of The Windy City seemed like a joke when it was first mentioned just a few months ago, but a new poll suggests it’s no laughing matter.

According to the results of a just-released Early & Often Poll, Lewis leads Rahm Emanuel, the current mayor, by nine points, 45.4 percent to 36.4 percent, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Pollsters presented four different head-to-head matchups to 1,037 registered Chicago voters who said they were likely to vote in the Feb. 24, 2105 mayoral election. Emanuel leads in two of those scenarios, but trails Lewis and County Board President Tony Preckwinkle.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

Pollster Gregg Durham characterized voters’ moods this way: “I might vote for somebody over Rahm Emanuel — but not anybody.”

That makes Lewis’ showing in the poll even more impressive.

“Wow,” said Lewis when the Sun-Times told her of the survey’s findings. “Well, first of all, I’m sitting here stunned.”

Lewis acknowledged that she’s “very, very seriously considering” a mayoral bid, and said she’ll announce her decision sometime next month when nominating petitions will begin circulating.

If the once-unthinkable happens and Lewis does get elected mayor of Chicago, it would have ruinous results on the city’s already wobbly school system.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are under mayoral control, which means the school board members, school board president and school superintendent are all appointed by the city’s chief executive. “Mayor Lewis” would undoubtedly fill the board with individuals who believe the only thing wrong with government-run schools is a lack of money.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

It was Lewis, after all, who led the Chicago Teachers Union in its 2012 strike – the city’s first in 25 years – in which the union demanded a 30 percent pay raise. (The union had to “settle” for a deal that lifts the average teacher’s pay by 17.6 percent over four years.)

A Lewis-appointed board would undoubtedly make huge “investments” in the schools by ramping up pay and benefits for its unionized teachers, while simultaneously ramping down accountability measures and other reforms designed to ferret out ineffective educators.

And since Lewis is also a fierce opponent of charter schools, she would certainly use her potential mayoral powers to crush the city’s alternative public schools – which many families have used to flee the failing and often dangerous government-run school system.

Anyway it’s sliced, a Lewis mayorship would be a disaster for the nation’s third-largest school district.

The Sun-Times cautions that the survey was taken shortly after Chicago’s just days after “a bloody Fourth of July weekend in which negative news dominated headlines and the airwaves with 71 people shot — 13 of them fatally.”

“The results are a snapshot in time — arguably taken at a time when Emanuel has been taking a beating in local and national media coverage,” the paper notes.

Regardless, it’s deeply troubling that Chicagoans would even consider voting for a left-wing radical like Lewis. Not only would she bring the school system to its knees, but her shoot-from-the-lip personality would be a major embarrassment to one of the nation’s most important cities.