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Tue Mar 07, 2006 at 02:06 PM CST
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| I have a class at UT called the Modern American Political Campaign. It's taught by Mark McKinnon, Matthew Dowd, Wayne Slater, and Paul Stekler. Today our guest speaker was pollster Michael Baselice, who has done polls for Perry and other Texas Republicans. He made some predictions about today's races that I'll share after the break . . . |
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| I asked him what he thought about the Kinky and Carol campaigns and he said his numbers show that they will hurt Democrats more than they will hurt Perry. Right now, Texas is about 50% Republican, 35% Democrat and 15% Independent. As long as those two are in the race and draw any voters away from the Democratic candidate, the Democrat will lose because there are simply not enough votes available for them. A Democrat might be able to pull 10% from the Republican 50%, but it's just as likely that Perry will pull in 10% of Democrats. With Kinky and Carol in the race, there just isn't enough of the pie left for the Democratic candidate to win because Kinky and/or Carol will take many independents, some Democrats and some Republicans. Perry can afford to lose some votes, Gammage or Bell cannot. Note that Baselice thinks Bell will win the Dem primary outright.
With respect to some of the Leininger 5 state house races, he has seen some of their data and based on that and his own instincts he made the following predictions:
District 7 - Tommy Merritt should hold on and win. Baselice thinks Mike Williams's attacks were too much and they backfired. Merritt had an effective response to the attacks.
District 9 - Roy Blake is probably going to lose his seat. Challenger Wayne Christian actually has better name recognition because he used to be a state rep and ran for US Congress last time around.
District 73 - Carter Casteel should hold on and win as well. Baselice thinks her opponent challenged her too late.
District 83 - Delwin Jones was never in trouble and should do fine.
District 94 - Grusendorf is in trouble, but Baselice wasn't ready to say he'd lose. |
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