Chron Poll Crosstabs

I realize that a fair amount of the detail numbers inside the Chron poll are more for humor than anything else, but here's a few that catch my eye ...

The Controller's Race:
Ron Green - 17.2%
Pam Holm - 15.0%
MJ Khan - 10.4%
Not Sure - 56.2%

Contests like these are tough to poll on since it's hard to even nudge people to a decisive answer. The truth is that many folks will head to the ballot box on 11/3 not knowing a thing about these three candidate. One third of them won't bother voting. But there will be several who cast a vote despite a lack of information about the candidates.

Comparing the "Not familiar" numbers on each Mayoral candidate:
Peter Brown: 28.8%
Annise Parker: 30.0%
Gene Locke: 46.3%
Roy Morales: 59.6%

First things first, compare all of those numbers to Bill White's 6.2%. I think I'll refer to this level of discrepancy the next time I hear how well known any member of council thinks they are based on years and years of service as they plot their path upward. Granted, I'll have to check these against the results of the Controller's race, also.

Now, focusing on the names presented, I find it interesting that Peter hasn't necessarily gotten substantially more known than Annise Parker despite a wide lead in money dropped on the Houston airwaves. The fav/unfav split is negligible enough to ignore. So what is it that Peter really got for all of his ad spending? This comparison might hold the first clue as to how tentative his poll lead was from the overall findings.

Secondly ... Gene Locke. I don't think for a second that 40% of Houston voters know who Roy Morales is, so I think it's safe to say that Gene is barely scraping north of "Generic" in these findings. I'll also highlight the fact that 40% of A-A respondents aren't familiar with Locke. Of course, It's worth another reminder that the poll was in the field during Gene's first week on the airwaves. It would be nice to see an update on this poll later, but I don't think we're going to get that. We'll have to wait until E-day to see if Gene ends up dropping enough money with the TV stations.

Another view of the demographic breakdowns:

           A-A       Anglo
Brown     22.6       21.8
Parker     8.4       25.2
Locke     25.8        8.6
Morales    0.3        9.6
Not Sure  40.7       33.1

Just one glance at those numbers, to me, justifies everything I covered here. The total for Hispanic voters was small enough to discount it's reliability (n = 88), but the findings had Brown with his most sizable lead among the demographic numbers.