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April 30, 2006

The squeeze on Wong

In her column on how soon-to-be-State Senator Dan Patrick is affecting the debate in Austin over the recently-passed business tax plan, Kristin Mack mentions what should be the third-highest profile race, at least in Harris County, this year: the battle in House District 134 between incumbent Martha Wong and Democratic challenger Ellen Cohen.

(By the way, that comparison of State House campaign money to Congressional campaign money should put the $3 million or so that James Leininger put into five GOP primary races into some context. No wonder there's been renewed push to limit how much one individual can contribute to state elections in a given year.)

If there's any good news for Wong, it's that she won her two previous races without full Republican support. In 2002, when Wong first ran for the State House, she got 53.1% of the vote in a district that supported statewide candidates at a 61.4% clip, and countywides at a 61.0% rate. That means Wong got 86.5% of the vote of the average statewide Republican in HD134. Had the district been only 57% Republican, Debra Danburg might still be in Austin.

Wong was running against a longterm incumbent in 2002, so even though HD134 was drawn to unseat Danburg, it's perhaps understandable that she might lag her partymates' performances. In 2004, running for re-election, Wong did improve her numbers, garnering 54.7% of the vote. She still ran behind almost everyone else, however, as the statewide GOP index was 56.4% and the countywide was 55.9%. That's good news in that she solidified her Republican base, and bad news in that said base was five points smaller. If that's a trend and not an anomaly, she's in deep doodoo before we even take into account other factors like GOP discontent and Cohen's many strengths as a candidate.

(Interestingly, one of the two people whose performance in HD134 Wong bettered was President Bush's. In the large majority of districts, Bush was the top performer among Republicans. For whatever the reason, that was not the case here in 2004. The other low-scoring Republican was 334th District Court Judge Sharon McCally, who had the closest countywide race of all against Democrat Kathy Stone.)

So, Martha Wong has trouble all around her. She's known as a tough, hardworking campaigner, and until proven otherwise this is still a Republican district, so nobody's counting any chickens here. But keep an eye on this race, because it's going to be a brawl. And if you aren't yet familiar with Ellen Cohen, check her out. There's a good chance she'll be in Austin next year.

Posted by Charles Kuffner at 12:40 PM | Comments (5)

April 28, 2006

Poll watching: SurveyUSA on the Governor's race

And now for the other high-profile race for this cycle: SurveyUSA has released a poll that has caused a fair amount of angst among Democrats:

15%     Bell (D)
16%     Friedman (I)
39%     Perry (R)
25%     Strayhorn (I)
3%      Other
3%      Undecided

Not a result to write home about for Democrat Chris Bell, is it? In previous polls, he's ranged from 13% to 21%, with both Zogby Interactive and a pre-primary Dallas Morning News poll putting him ahead of Strayhorn. That 13% showing was in a pre-primary Rasmussen poll, which also had Strayhorn at 31%. The most recent Rasmussen poll dropped Strayhorn to 19%, with Bell inching up to 17%.

Assuming that Strayhorn and Friedman do qualify for the ballot (and for what it's worth, I think they will), I think polling for this race is going to present unique challenges. Pollsters already have to make assumptions about turnout, demography, and partisan makeup, and this year they can't really be certain that previous years will be much of a useful guide. For those of us who like to see and study polls, the best I can ask for is that we get a lot of them, with enough information about their methods so that we can reasonably compare and judge them.

Having said all that, there are two things I want to explore about this poll. As this is a long post, I've put the rest in the extended entry.

One comes from the poll's notes about its sample:

985 registered voters out of 1200 adults is about 82.1% of the voting age population (VAP). Checking the Turnout and Voter Registration Figures from the Secretary of State, that's basically in line with the last two gubernatorial seasons. What stands out to me is the designation of 579 registered voters as "likely". I'm not sure how likely SUSA thinks they are to vote, but if they all did show up at the polls, that would represent 57.8% turnout.

That, I believe, is way out of line. Here are the turnout numbers going back a few cycles:

(I left a comment to this effect at that BOR post I linked to earlier.) Fifty-eight percent would be a new high in Presidential election turnout for recent years. It's not even close to the levels of turnout in the last two non-Presidential years. Things become a little different starting in 1994, because a much lower portion of the VAP was actually registered. 4,396,242 voted in November of 1994, compared to 4,553,979 in 2002. The difference is there were over 4 million more registered voters in 2002, but the VAP had only grown by two million.

Bottom line is that it's hard to take seriously the assumption that 58% of registered voters are likely to actually turn out. Who might benefit from such a high-turnout scenario? Well, one candidate has been talking about it.

Plugging in the numbers, 39% turnout among the VAP in 2002 would have been 48% among registered voters. That's still a long way from 58%, though I'm sure Friedman wouldn't mind it. That's what you want to happen when you pitch yourself to the disaffecteds. I have my doubts about it as a strategy, because people who don't vote are notoriously hard to motivate. I can't say how a more realistic turnout projection would affect the end result, but I feel pretty secure in saying that Friedman would have scored lower.

There's one more thing to discuss, and that's the crosstabs, which show Bell garnering only 32% support from self-identified Democrats. Needless to say, that would be a death knell. Again, though, I have to wonder how realistic that is for the race itself. I recently took a look at straight-ticket voting in 2004, and after seeing this poll, I went back to a bunch of County Clerk websites and eyeballed things for 2002. I'll spare you the details, because I didn't have the time or energy to write it all down, but my seat-of-the-pants estimate is that a little more than half of all people who generally voted Democratic in 2002 voted a straight ticket.

I'll cite one example, from Harris County. In 2002, there were 171,594 straight Democratic votes. Ron Kirk, the Democratic candidate for Senate, got a total of 294,673 votes in Harris, meaning about 58% of his total came from people who pushed one button. Most candidates got a slightly higher portion from the straight-ticketers; John Sharp, the high scorer with over 301,000 votes, got about 56% this way.

The proportions varied in other counties, with some deeper red ones like Collin having about 33% of Dems voting straight, while more traditional Democratic counties like Hidalgo and Jefferson topped 70%. As I said, I don't have the wherewithal to do them all, but my best guess is that a slight majority of Dems who voted in 2002 voted for the straight party ticket. I did a little checking in 1998 (not all county clerk pages have archives that go back that far), and the ratio was about the same in that year as well.

If we assume that this holds true in 2006, then it establishes a floor of support for Bell. In 2002 the average statewide Dem got about 43% of the vote; in 2004 in the three non-Presidential races, it was about 41.5%. Depending on your assumption of Democratic turnout and the continuation of this pattern, that suggests that Bell can't possibly do worse than 20 to 25%, and that's before we even take into account the roughly half of all nominal Democrats who don't push the straight-party button. (I'm one of them; even if I wind up voting only for Dems, I make a choice in every race. I've never voted for a straight party ticket.)

It's for reasons like this that various prognosticators have written recently that Bell is in a position where he can win. If he can hold most of the Democratic vote (which still remains to be seen), and if Strayhorn can peel enough Republicans off of Rick Perry (who consistently clocks in at 35 to 40 percent in these polls), then he has a shot. He certainly has a clearer path to a win than Strayhorn, who has to appeal more or less equally to Dems and Republicans, does.

Now of course, I've just made an assumption. I'm assuming that people who are in the habit of voting a straight ticket will continue to do so. I could be wrong about this - we really don't know what's going to happen in November right now. But I feel pretty confident in betting on the generally unchanging nature of human behavior. I say it's unlikely in the extreme that Bell does as poorly as this SUSA survey shows. I'll feel much happier about that when and if future surveys reflect this. Until then, I say look at all the data, and consider any single poll to be one piece of the puzzle.

Posted by Charles Kuffner at 10:29 AM | Comments (7)

April 27, 2006

Two views of CD22

I know I just said that I want to bring some attention to races other than the one in Congressional District 22, but what can I say? There's a lot of material to work with there.

Via Daily Kos, I see that CQ Politics has rated the now-open seat race in CD22 as having "No clear favorite". This stands in contrast to Charlie Cook, who in the wake of Tom DeLay's resignation announcement moved the seat from Toss-up to Likely Republican. This is a pretty wide range of opinion.

On the one hand, in a vacuum, CD22 really isn't competitive. Much has been written about how DeLay generously weakened his own district to bolster those drawn for other Republicans, but as others have pointed out, the change wasn't that drastic. Besides, the new district is still fairly solidly Republican. Look at how the four statewide Republican candidates did in CD22 in 2004 for a clearer picture. I've got a Excel spreadsheet that crunches the numbers, which I'll summarize here:

DeLay got 150,377 votes and 55.1% of the vote in his four-way race. Victor Carillo also had a Libertarian opponent, which is why his vote total was lower than Mike Keasler's, but his two-candidate share of the vote is higher.

In a vacuum, you'd look at that and say "Solid GOP, next please." But this isn't a vacuum. For one thing, the Democrats have a seasoned and extremely well-funded candidate in Nick Lampson. How well-funded is he? At this point in the race, he has more cash on hand than every other Democratic challenger in any Congressional race. Heck, he has more cash on hand than all but 11 sitting incumbent Congresspeople. That kind of money can go a long way to cutting into partisan advantage.

Lampson's opponent, on the other hand, hasn't raised a dime. That's because he doesn't have an opponent yet, and won't until at least June, after DeLay establishes residency in Virginia and thus causes Texas GOP Chair Tina Benkiser to declare him ineligible for the ballot. Lampson will likely be over the $2 million mark in cash on hand by then, and his competitor will have a lot of catching up to do.

(I should pause here for a moment to note that the Lampson campaign has not conceded that DeLay can be replaced on the ballot at this stage of the game. It's not out of the question that the point could be litigated. What happens then is anyone's guess.)

Further, the process to replace DeLay has had bumps in the road, and the Republicans may come out of it with a less-than-unified front. DeLay's replacement for November will be chosen by a committee of Republican precinct chairs from the four counties that comprise CD22 (Brazoria, Fort Bend, Galveston, and Harris). Fort Bend and Harris make up 80% of the district, but their votes on the committee will count for as much as those of Brazoria and Galveston. Not all precincts in each county have chairs, and the process to fill those vacancies is causing some heartburn among party insiders. Finally, outgoing Fort Bend GOP Chair Eric Thode sent out an informal poll to Republican primary voters in his county with a list of potential replacements, which you can see here. The unilateralness of his action, as well as the limited pool of voters to which the poll was sent, has been another source of disagreement.

(I should pause again to note that all this is to pick a replacement Republican nominee for the November general election. Though we won't have one in May, the possibility exists that Governor Perry will call a special election in November, to coincide with the general, to fill the remaining two months of DeLay's term. That would be open to all comers, and would necessitate a runoff if no one got 50% of the vote. If the winner of that race is also the winner of the general, he or she would get to be sworn in ahead of the rest of the Class of 2006, and thus get a leg up on seniority. For my money, this is too bizarre to contemplate, but it could happen.)

Issues of money and unity aside, in the end the replacement for DeLay will almost certainly have ties to DeLay which Lampson and his megamillion-dollar warchest will try to exploit. Poll after poll shows a nationwide preference for Democrats in Congress, though how much that will translate to CD22 remains to be seen.

In short, this race is very much not being run in a vacuum, and what the ultimate disposition of it is depends entirely on who the chosen candidate is and how hard it was to pick him or her. I could say that the truth lies in between the two differing assessments, but I think it's really indeterminate at this point. Until we fill in the blank, we can't accurately judge the race.

(Thanks to The Muse for the links.)

Posted by Charles Kuffner at 10:03 PM | Comments (1)

Please allow me to introduce myself

Hi. My name is Charles, and I blog about politics.

I got started back in January of 2002, when the blog world was a lot smaller, more conservative, and almost completely done by amateurs. I just wanted an outlet to write on a regular basis, and after stumbling across a friend's blog while surfing one day, I plunged in.

At the time, I thought I was going to write about sports. I'd had a sports column while in college, and figured that's where my interest would be. Turned out I was wrong, and I was drawn into blogging about politics almost right away. After a few months, I bought a domain and set up the version of Off the Kuff that's still around today.

(Off the Kuff was also the name of my college sports column, by the way. When something works, you stick with it.)

I consider myself a mainstream, progressive Democrat. There was a time when I'd vote for some Republicans, but there's almost nothing about the current version of that party or its leadership that appeals to me. Lord knows, the Democrats are't perfect, but they're far more in tune with my beliefs and priorities, and as such, I'm happy to support them.

Blogging has made me much more of an activist in politics. I go to meetings. I talk to candidates and elected officials, in person and via email. I was a deputy voter registrar in 2004-05, and will be one again this year. Writing about politics made me follow it much more closely, and the more I did that, the more I wanted to do something to make a difference. It's really not as hard as you think to do that. Those differences are often small, but they're there.

One thing I feel strongly about is that there's a real lack of coverage in most elections. There are a couple of high-profile races that get a decent amount of ink - this year, that's primarily the Governor's race and Congressional District 22 - but just about everything else goes in without much notice. That's a gap that I hope to help fill here. I can't do it all, but I will do what I can.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here, and I look forward to talking with you.

Posted by Charles Kuffner at 06:17 PM | Comments (8)