Gov. Rick Perry leads U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison among likely Republican primary voters, according to a new poll done for the Texas Lyceum.
That survey has the governor leading his primary challenger by 12 percentage points — 33 to 21 percent — with a large number of voters — 41 percent — still undecided.
A small group — 1 percent — expressed support for state Rep. Leo Berman. Perry leads Hutchison among self-identified Republicans 40 percent to 18 percent, but that's also the group with the largest number of undecided voters, at 48 percent. Hutchison carries 49 percent of self-identified Democrats and Independents who say they plan to vote in the GOP primary, compared to 23 percent for Perry and 29 percent undecided.
Voters clearly haven't tuned into the Democratic primary contest — 81 percent haven't made a choice. Those who have like Kinky Friedman, with 10 percent; Tom Schieffer, with 6 percent, then state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, with 3 percent (Van de Putte announced this week that after looking at the race she doesn't intend to run).
They're largely undecided on their favorite candidates for U.S. Senate, should Hutchison resign late this year and prompt a special election in May 2010. Given the choice of six Republicans and two Democrats who've expressed interest in that race, 71 percent said they either haven't decided or didn't want to say. Houston Mayor Bill White led the pack with 9 percent, followed by Attorney General Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, with 4 percent; Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones and former Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams, 3 percent; and state Sen. Florence Shapiro, former Comptroller John Sharp, and Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams, at 2 percent. Sharp and White are Democrats; the others are Republicans.
The poll was conducted for the Texas Lyceum [0], a statewide leadership organization, by Daron Shaw of the University of Texas at Austin and by James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT.
They polled 860 people by telephone on June 5-12. The margin of error is a little different on each part of the poll. Everyone was asked about the U.S. Senate race and the approval/disapproval questions, and the margin of error there is +/-3.34 percent (which means, in that Senate result, that everyone in the pack is in a statistical tie right now). The subgroup saying they were "certain" or "likely" to vote in the GOP primary was smaller, so the margin of error on that gubernatorial primary is +/- 6.04 percent; in the Democratic primary, it's +/-6.14 percent. Full poll results (and those for two previous polls) are online here [1]. And the group preceded this political poll with one on the economy and other policy issues the previous day [2].
Texans think President Barack Obama is doing a "very" or "somewhat" good job with the economy (63 percent), and they like the way he's handling his job as president more generally (68 percent). The number of Texans who don't have an opinion on either of those two assessments was very small.
Asked to grade Perry's performance, 57 percent said they approve and 30 percent said they don't approve. Hutchison got good marks from 65 percent and bad ones from 17 percent. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn has the approval of 55 percent and disapproval of 19 percent. The Texas Legislature, which finished the regular session several days before the polling began, has the approval of 58 percent of respondents and disapproval of 28 percent — numbers almost identical to Perry's.
Disclosure Being Good for the Soul: Our editor helped kick around the questions that were asked in the poll and wrote the poll summaries to explain all of those numbers that resulted. Now you know.