And the newspapers get into the polling game.
The poll found Perry leading with 45 percent support among likely Republican voters, with Hutchison at 29 percent and Medina at 17 percent; 8 percent said they were undecided. The Feb. 2-10 telephone interview survey of 464 likely Republican voters has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.
The survey was conducted for the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News, the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram by Blum & Weprin Associates Inc.
[Pollster Mickey] Blum said normally poll numbers for an incumbent such as Perry will be mirrored in election returns. She said this is an unusual election, though.
“He looks good at this point: A 16-point lead and now the third candidate imploding,” Blum said. “He doesn’t need very much to get to 50 percent. He just needs (Medina’s) people to either stay home or vote for him.”
[…]
Looking ahead to the general election, Democrat Bill White had potentially good news in the survey.
White trailed Perry in a general election match-up 43 percent to 37 percent and Hutchison by 42 percent to 34 percent.
Blum said that gives White a solid base despite the fact about two-thirds of 1,508 registered voters surveyed did not know enough about him to have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of him. She said he, essentially, is polling as a generic Democrat.
So this poll is in line with all the others; they did not sample Democratic primary voters, so we can’t compare results there. The main thing that strikes me about all these results is that while White’s numbers vary from the mid 30s to the low 40s – “generic Democrat” numbers, as I’ve said before and as pollster Blum agrees – Perry’s number are in a fairly tight band from the low 40s to the mid 40s. Other than one Rasmussen result from January, he’s never touched 50%. That’s generally bad news for a long-time incumbent, and I don’t think it’s getting nearly enough attention. On a related note, where there used to be a gap between how well Perry did against White and how well KBH did, their results now are basically identical. Either she’s lost her crossover appeal, or she’s appealing to a different but equally sized pool of voters as Perry is. In any event, I think we have a pretty good picture now of where things stand. I can’t wait to see what it will look like when the primaries are all over.