Day Two of the UH Hobby School of Public Affairs poll, and a second result showing that MJ Hegar is in a strong position to make the primary runoff for Senate.
MJ Hegar
Hegar, a Round Rock Democrat who narrowly lost a 2018 Congressional race to incumbent Republican John Carter, is the best-known candidate among the crowded field. Still, more than half of voters said they did not know enough about her to have an opinion. Those numbers were even higher for the other 11 candidates.
Among people who indicated a preference in the race, Hegar was the top choice of 41%, more than three times the vote preference for state Sen. Royce West of Dallas, at 12.3%. Chris Bell, a former Houston city councilman and congressman, was in third place with support from 10.8% of voters, while Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez was fourth, with 8.3%.
The other eight candidates were led by Annie Garcia and Michael Cooper, each with 5.4%; Amanda Edwards with 5.0%; and Sema Hernandez with 4.5%
Renée Cross, senior director of the Hobby School, said the Senate race has been overshadowed by the Democratic presidential primary. And having a dozen candidates hasn’t made it easier for voters to sort out the Democratic Senate race.
“Texas Democrats were optimistic about their chances against Republican Sen. John Cornyn, especially after Beto O’Rourke came close against Ted Cruz in 2018,” she said. “But with so many candidates, it’s been hard for anyone to stand out.”
The poll, conducted between Feb. 6 and Feb. 18 among likely Democratic primary voters, found Hegar leading across all geographic areas of the state except for the border – although Bell came close in the Houston area – and across most generational, racial and ethnic groups. West drew more support from African Americans with 28.5%, compared to 18.1% for Hegar.
The full report is here, and the Hobby School landing page for their 2020 primary polling is here. I reported on their Presidential primary polling here.
I kind of hate the way they presented the data in that writeup, because it’s the result of an adjustment to the raw data that’s not clear unless you read this closely. Basically, what they did was take the initial response numbers, then recalculate them after throwing out the non-respondents. This has the effect of almost doubling everyone’s totals. They did this in the Presidential poll too, it’s just that there were just far fewer of these “don’t know/nobody” respondents, so the effect was much smaller. In the raw numbers, as you can see on that full report link, Hegar led with 22% (Table 2, page 3), followed by West at 6.6% and Bell at 5.8&, then the rest in proportionate amounts. It doesn’t change the big picture – Hegar has a significant lead, which is the same result that the UT/Trib poll got, with numbers similar to the raw totals here – it just looks funny.
To be fair, some adjustment is reasonable, because it really is the case that a non-trivial number of people who will vote in the primary will not vote in the non-Presidential races, as we discussed before. My estimate of the dropoff rate is around 25%, so if we assume everyone in the Hobby sample will vote in the Presidential race, more than half of those “don’t know/no one” respondents will still pick someone in the Senate race. You could take a crack at extrapolating from there, but honestly, I’d have just left it – and reported it – as it was. Like I said, the basic story was accurate. Why fudge around like that?
Amanda Edwards got elected in 2015 and then vanished until she decided to run for Senate ,Did someone Not tell her that 2.3 million Houstonians tend to notice when your absent from an entire 4 year term.
MJ has my vote and I look forward to her campaign against the intellectually dishonest Cornyn.
Really Like Royce West, but my feeling is her military chops will help tremendously in a statewide Texas race.