Texas Governor's Race: Average of 11 Public Polls in 2010 Show Rick Perry at 47%, Bill White at 40%

by: Phillip Martin, Progress Texas

Mon May 24, 2010 at 01:04 PM CDT

The Texas Tribune has released their latest poll, which shows Rick Perry at 44%, Bill White at 35%. Two key points to highlight from the poll:

• Rick Perry, a ten-year incumbent, remains under 50% in the Tribune poll. That means that the only head-to-head polls to show Perry above 50% this entire election cycle are from Rasmussen, and Nate Silver has shown pretty well how their "house effect" can change polls -- and further analysis shows that Rasmussen polls early to set the narrative, then leaves come Election Day.
  
  
• The Tribune poll shows that White's margin among Hispanics is only 43-32%. Anyone who believes that number is simply off-base. Translation: Bill White has enormous room to grow.
  

The Tribune poll is the 11th public poll we've had on the Texas Governor's race in 2010. Preferably, we would do regression based trendlines of the polls -- like those at Pollster.com -- but quite frankly, I didn't have time. (If anyone wants to make a graph with the data below, you can e-mail it to me at phillip@burntorangereport.com and I'll see if it's something we can put on our site). Instead, I've done a simple average of polls taken so far in 2010, and tried to put all our data points into one place:

A few thoughts about the numbers above:

• I made this chart so we had easy access to all data points. Click on the name of the pollster and you will get to the original documentation of the poll.
  
  
• We need better polling in Texas. Both Rasmussen and the Texas Tribune polls have highly suspect areas of methodology. Rasmussen appears to swing wildly and refuses to release any of their sample size figures; the Tribune is an internet poll that previously identified 90% of respondents as being very or fairly involved in politics. As much as I'd love to have 90% of respondents very familiar with politics, I think we all know that's not the case here in Texas.
  
  
• What strikes me most about the polls above is that when Bill White was present on TV statewide -- mid-February into the primary -- he was polling within 4-6 points. Now that he's doing regional television to build name ID and we've slipped into the summer season of the campaign, the poll numbers appear to be trending back towards a generic Dem vs. Rep. ballot question. White remains in striking distance, but he's definitely got ground to gain and we need to get involved and do all we can to help him get elected.