White leads Sanchez 53-35% for mayor, Parker leads Tatro 46-26% for Controller. Can White top 60%? We'll know tomorrow night...
Houston businessman Bill White holds a commanding lead over former City Councilman Orlando Sanchez as they head into Saturday's mayoral runoff, according to a Houston Chronicle/KHOU-TV poll.
City Councilwoman Annise Parker has a big lead over Councilman Bruce Tatro for city controller.
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White has substantial support among all ethnic and partisan groups, including most of the African-American voters who supported state Rep. Sylvester Turner before he was eliminated in the first round of voting Nov. 4.
Sanchez's coalition of white Republicans and Hispanics has not held as strong as it did in 2001, when he lost a narrow runoff to Mayor Lee Brown, prohibited by city term limits from seeking re-election this year.
White narrowly led Sanchez in the Nov. 4 voting, 38 percent to 33 percent. Going into the runoff, White has a 53 percent to 35 percent lead, the poll shows, with 12 percent undecided.
For White to lose would take some sudden revelation about his background damaging enough to turn away his supporters, said University of Houston pollster and political scientist Richard Murray.
The Sanchez campaign had no such revelations Thursday, and negative bullets he fired previously mostly have turned out to be blanks.
"It looks like Bill White won this race in August and September, when he was moving steadily ahead and removed the presumption that Sanchez was the front-runner," Murray said. "Once it seemed inevitable that White would be in the runoff, the race was virtually over."
The story of the 2003 campaign is White's ability to bring together various factions of the city, said Rice University political scientist Bob Stein, who conducted the poll with Murray.
He splits the white vote with Sanchez, the poll shows, and gets 75 percent of the black vote compared with 6 percent for Sanchez.
Sanchez has support from 55 percent of Hispanic poll respondents and 71 percent of Republicans.
But in 2001, Sanchez drew 72 percent of the Hispanic vote and more than 90 percent of the Republican vote when he lost to Lee Brown with 48 percent of the total vote.
"What this means is that if he wins, as he should, Bill White will have support from all groups, which should minimize attacks at the council table," Stein said. "This should help him govern."
Murray said that White's support among African-Americans swings the race strongly to his favor. Of those who voted for Turner Nov. 4, 76 percent now say they support White, compared with 4 percent for Sanchez.
Turner, a black Democrat, has not endorsed a candidate in the runoff. But almost all other black elected officials in Houston support White, including Mayor Brown, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee.
Sanchez started campaigning in black communities during the runoff campaign, after mostly bypassing those neighborhoods in 2001 and in the first-round campaign this year.
"The African-American bloc is what is going to make the biggest difference in this runoff," Murray said.
In the controller race, Parker, who is term-limited in her at-large council seat, has a 46 percent to 26 percent lead over Tatro, a term-limited district council member from northwest Houston.
The winner will replace Judy Gray Johnson, appointed by the City Council to fill the unexpired term of Sylvia Garcia when Garcia was elected a Harris County commissioner. Gray did not seek election to the office, which oversees city finances.
Parker leads among all ethnic groups, Democrats and independents. She picked up most of those who supported four other candidates she and Tatro eliminated Nov. 4.
Tatro holds a 2-1 lead among Republicans.
Certainly good news, here. No surprise, though. It's been conventional wisdom for the last several months that White and Parker have built the types of White Democratic and Independent, Black and Hispanic coalitions to win city elections in Houston. It's interesting to see that Sanchez only has a bare majority of the Hispanic vote and only 71% of Republicans. This race has been over for awhile now.
I'll also be looking to see if Peter Brown and Ronald Green can pull out their At-Large races. If so, Democrats could pull off a clean sweep in the run-offs tomorrow.
