Common Sense

I’m feeling bad, cut me some slack.

BOR has the June SUSA governor numbers and some commentary on the crosstabs:

1,200 Texas adults were interviewed 6/23/06 - 6/25/06. Of them, 1,007 were Registered Voters. Of them, 576 were judged to be “likely” voters. MoE ± 4.2%

Statistically, it’s a three-way tie for second place. Perry’s lost support and Bell has gained ground since the April tracking poll. Interestingly, Strayhorn also seems to have lost support while Friedman has gained ground.

The base of the Democratic party has jelled beneath Bell and that fits into his message that all people have to do is vote the way they normally would and we come out on top. Support for Strayhorn seems to be right-leaning in nature and Friedman is holding the votes that would otherwise be going to the Democrat.

My biggest fear with this four-way race was that Democrats would jump ship and side with Strayhorn come November because she would be the lesser of two evils. I’m not really worried about that because we’re not seeing a lot of Democratic support for her now. As she loses more support to Friedman, who is actually kind of independent, the chances of that are less.

Friedman is more the abboration. I’m not claiming he’s “stealing votes” from the Democrats. But Bell is only pulling in about 10% of the Independent vote when our party needs more than 50% to reach the 40% we need to pull in a W on Election Day. I suspect those independents are siding with Friedman because they don’t like Perry or the GOP policies/failures. It’s going to be harder to justify voting for Kinky to themselves once it becomes apparent that voting for him is what will lead to Perry’s third term.

Just because it is interesting to me, I was looking at the crosstab on education levels. Support from those who did not attend college: Bell 17%, Friedman 9%, Strayhorn 16%, Perry 51%. That’s only funny to me because of the Republican stereotype of them being anti-intellectual and uneducated. It is just a stereotype, right?