Mayor Sylvester Turner leads Tony Buzbee among likely voters in the December 14 runoff election for Mayor by 56 percent to 34 percent, with 6 percent of voters undecided. Another 5 percent of respondents refused to reveal for whom they would vote.
Support for the Mayoral runoff candidates does not vary significantly among voters who are certain to vote in the runoff election and those who are very likely to vote in the runoff election.
“There’s really nowhere for Tony Buzbee to go and I think proof of that is he’s not buying a lot of TV ads, he’s not spending the kind of money he spent in the general election,” said Bob Stein, KHOU political analyst.
Among voters who supported Bill King in the November general election, 53 percent now support Tony Buzbee and 37 percent support Mayor Turner.
Among voters who identify as Democrat, Republican or Independent, the majority of Democratic voters support Turner and the majority of Republican voters support Buzbee. Votes for either candidate are roughly the same among Independent voters.
“This is a partisan vote, the mayor is winning well over 90% of democratic voters, but he’s picking up almost 20% of Republican voters,” Stein said.
See here and here for the November polls done by KHOU and Houston Public Media, both of which showed Turner leading Buzbee by about 20 points. I said after Election Day that all of Buzbee’s voters plus all of King’s voters were still less than all of Turner’s voters, so if Buzbee is only getting a big more than half of King’s voters, he’s in very deep doodoo. And as we know from the Keir Murray analysis, the electorate is much more Democratic than Republican, as is the city as a whole. It all makes sense, is what I’m saying. Note that the sample for this poll is “234 of the 516 registered voters who were previously interviewed in September and October 2019”, which is both a little weird and makes the margin of error higher than usual, but since the vast majority of runoff voters are people who voted in November, it’s quite reasonable. HPM has more.
If people voted by party we would not have three at large Republicans in city council.
Sanchez did not lose by 20 points, he lost by 2 percentage points. While I expect that Turner will win, the african-american vote is down about 12% during early vote. Republican votes are up about 5%. With Sue Lovell and Gayle Fallon endorsing Buzbee it may shift some liberal votes.
It may depend on who can get their voters to the polls on Saturday. Buzbee I think will carry the Latino vote about 55-60 percent.
I think Knox and Kubosh will both be re-elected, would not be surprised that the guy with the alleged white nationalist as campaign manager also wins because of name ID.
Lovell endorsed Buzbee….that’s surprising.
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I expected Buzbee and Turner to split the Lovell and Boykins vote. I did not expect Turner to be doing as well with King voters.
I think the largely unprecedented level of effort by the HCDP to support a unified city wide slate of D candidates will help consolidate the D vote enough that Democrats should win most if not all city wide races. Kubosh and Knox might hang on(in order of likeliness to do so) but with 53 percent of all city voters thus far with a clear Dem voting history all Democrats have to do is convince the Democrats to vote for their candidates.
I know an awful lot of straight democratic voters that are not voting for raj, quite a few also voted for Orlando Sanchez, some democratic precinct chairs helped him behind the scenes.
The poll included a question about Knox v. Salhotra, which I have not seen reported anywhere. Also asked were right path/wrong path and partisan identification.