Texas Poll: Out With the Old, In With the New

Dallas Morning News: Perry tops Strayhorn in poll of Republican voters

Well, the polls are in and the prize fight numbers stand as follows:

Perry: 46%
Strayhorn: 28%

Kinda hard to spin this as encouraging when you're the incumbent and you've been in office for 5 years.

Now, for our side of the aisle, let's see how a certain potential candidate is faring after having been on the statewide ballot every 4 years since 1986:

Undecided: 54%
Sharp: 16%
Bell: 10%
Alvarado: 8%

So much for John Sharp's vaunted popularity all over the state.

The bottom line for the results on our side is that there's no great demand to replace one failed leader with the guy who failed to defeat him in 1998. Chris is still a relatively unknown quantity outside of activist circles. But he's at least out on the campaign trail raising his visibility, rather than coasting on a fleeting Reagan-era popularity among people that, apparently, aren't even willing to vote on name ID.

As for the other side of the aisle, the numbers represent a ding in Perry's armor, having fallen from 55% in July while Strayhorn's numbers have held even. That Strayhorn consistency is still within my range of predictions for the grandma. It's hard to see her numbers improving from this point forward, though. Perry won't call another Special Session in order to demonstrate his ongoing failure to have a worthwhile idea on either education policy or school financing. Without that, Strayhorn's only hope for being on the ballot in November is that Perry has a miscue with livestock.