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Sunday, January 15, 2006

TX-22: Lampson Leading in Wide-Open Poll

Posted by DavidNYC

An interesting - if hard-to-read - poll on TX-22 from the Houston Chronicle (registered voters, no trendlines):

Lampson: 30
DeLay: 22
Stockman: 11
None: 11
Undecided 27
(MoE: ±4.1%)

Steven Stockman is a former one-term GOP Congressman (swept in in `94, booted in `96 by Nick Lampson, actually) who is thinking about a possible independent challenge to DeLay. Presumably, he'd drawn Republican votes from the Bugman.

With crazy numbers like these - nearly 40% not even expressing a preference - it would probably be a mistake to read too much into this poll, at least as far as the horserace numbers go. But the Chron asked several other relevant questions. DeLay's favorability rating is a brutal 28-60. (Sixty? Ouch!) And 47% of respondents said he should withdraw from the race (vs. 40% who said he should stay in). That would actually be a bad thing for Lampson, as TX-22 is a very Republican district and Tom DeLay is by far the most beatable candidate he could face.

Wackily, DeLay only gets 21% in a question on the GOP primary (there are some Republicans running against him), with 68% undecided. Perhaps district voters are just unaccustomed to having to vote for DeLay in a primary - but perhaps it's also a sign of tremendously weak support among his putative base. That 21% is identical to his total in the general election matchup. Incumbents lose primaries even more rarely than they lose general elections, so I really, truly doubt that DeLay could get knocked off in a primary. But this number is really startling, and must be giving him indigestion.

(Thanks to Evan at Tom DeLay vs. the World. Full list of questions is here.)

Posted at 12:25 AM in 2006 Elections - House, Texas | Technorati

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Comments

Wow a lot of people are pissed at Delay i would figure Delay would at least hold around 30-40% at the lowest In a district that voted in the mid 60's for Bush.

Posted by: D in FL. at January 15, 2006 01:34 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

Hey, your quotebox is eating the page.

Posted by: RBH at January 15, 2006 02:08 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

RBH, is there a formatting problem?

Posted by: DavidNYC at January 15, 2006 02:14 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

The gray quote box doesn't cut off after the poll numbers.

Posted by: RBH at January 15, 2006 02:23 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

Quote boxes automatically extend (most) of the length of the page. Usually when you quote something, you're quoting a stream of text that's more than one line long, so the boxes look "normal." I'm not sure if there's a way to automatically make a quote box narrower, but in any event, we've been using them on polls for a long time, and I don't think it looks too bad.

Posted by: DavidNYC at January 15, 2006 02:36 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

Ok.

But a check of the source information does show that the small tag isn't quite closed (it lacks the >)

I don't know if that would change anything though.

And the quote box going across the page isn't the problem, it's going down the page (which gives a gray background for the page).

Maybe it's a feature, not a bug.

Posted by: RBH at January 15, 2006 02:49 AM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

RBH: I fixed the "small" tag, thanks. In Firefox, the quote box ended normally, so I didn't see the problem. Is it fixed now?

Posted by: DavidNYC at January 15, 2006 06:00 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

Yep, it's fixed here in IE-land

Posted by: RBH at January 15, 2006 10:07 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment

I take the horserace numbers with a grain of salt. But what's really encouragining is Stockman's numbers. If he gets double digits, Lampson will win, because pretty much all of his voters would ahve otherwise gone for Delay.

Posted by: safi at January 15, 2006 10:12 PM | Permalink | Edit Comment | Delete Comment