The Democratic Party's Seoul mayor candidate Chong Won-o (Yonhap) The Democratic Party of Korea's Chong Won-o is projected to win the Seoul mayoral race, a joint exit poll of three major TV networks showed Wednesday, shortly after polling stations for the local elections closed at 6 p.m.Chong, 57, was expected to win 51.4 percent of votes, 5.4 percentage points ahead of the conservative incumbent Oh Se-hoon, who was seeking a fifth term, according to an exit poll conducted at 595 polling stations nationwide and augmented by a telephone poll of 28,500 respondents.The exit poll was conducted by the Korea Election Pool, a body comprising representatives of the Korean Broadcasters Association and TV networks of KBS, MBC and SBS.If Chong is elected, the political pendulum will swing to back to the left in the capital after five years of conservative control. The last Democratic Party mayor of Seoul was late Park Won-soon, who was first elected to the post in 2011 but killed himself in 2020 amid allegations of sexual harassment.Before his bid for the Seoul mayoral race, Chong served as the chief of Seongdong-gu ward office in eastern Seoul for 12 years. Seongdong-gu was home to Seongsu-dong neighborhood, an industrial district that turned into a tourism hotspot over the past decade.Chong has vowed to resolve housing supply bottlenecks to curb the heated housing market during his campaign pledges.