Dead Heat in the Mayor's race: New Poll shows Turner, King, tied. Doug Miller, KHOU.com
The survey shows both candidates supported by 38 percent of surveyed voters, with roughly one-quarter of voters still uncommitted. About 13 percent told pollsters they didn’t know how they would vote, while another 11 percent refused to answer the question
So, it's razor thin then, going down to the wire and we're likely to have a scenario where YOUR VOTE COUNTS. Especially, as 'they' are prone to say, in a run-off election where it COUNTS EVEN MORE!!! MORE do you hear?!?!
OK, enough with that. A couple of key points here:
1. Recent polling by Stein has been off. And by off, I mean not even really close. He had King polling at 3% prior to the general election and had Parker's Folly winning by a comfortable margin. For whatever reason his polls are developing a blind spot toward conservative voters.
2. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that Stein is under-sampling Republicans. In this vote his partisan breakdown (shown on the KHOU report) is 35% Democrat (low-ish) 15% Republican (very low) and 57% Independent. (way, way too high). Now, granted, it's become fashionable for Republicans to say they are not Republican these days and there is a large grouping of people who say they're independent voters despite never having cast a vote for that "other" party in decades. So, for the high independent numbers, I give Stein a pass. But the Republican percentage certainly seems low, almost by half.
These two things, combined with what we know about the race from other polls, suggests that King certainly COULD be in the lead and, at the least, he's in a foot race with Turner until the end.
All of this means that I'm in agreement with Evan. If Bill King loses this, it will be a surprise.
That doesn't mean he's a shoe-in (no one ever is, and the Democrats could produce a huge turnout on Saturday) but it means he's in the lead based on the data that I've seen.
Fortunately, this will all be over after Saturday.
