Russia's Medvedev heading for giant vote win: poll

MOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin's preferred successor, Dmitry Medvedev, will win the backing of 80 percent of Russian voters in next month's election, according to an independent poll released on Thursday.

The Levada pollsters found most voters consider the March 2 election a foregone conclusion and believe Medvedev will rule under the influence of Putin, who is set to step down in May.

Excluding those who won't vote, the Levada survey found Medvedev had nearly a 70 percentage point lead over the nearest of his three challengers.

Medvedev's rating was down two percentage points from a comparable Levada poll in January, but still well ahead of his nearest challenger, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, whose support rose 1.5 points to 10.5 percent.

LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky was in third place with 9 percent and Andrei Bogdanov of the small Democratic Party in fourth place with just 0.1 percent.

The poll showed 63 percent of voters expect Medvedev to operate under the control of Putin and his Kremlin entourage. Just 19 percent of voters think he will act independently.

A clear majority believe there will be little real struggle between the candidates, with 54 certain that the authorities have already decided the outcome.

Levada queried 1,600 people in 46 regions between February 8-11 and estimates a 3 percent margin of error in its findings.

For more on Russia's presidential election, please see our blog "Operation Successor" at blogs.reuters.com/russia.

(Reporting by Conor Sweeney; Editing by Ibon Villelabeitia)