UH/Hobby poll: Mealer 47, Hidalgo 45

They’re the only outfit that has polled Harris County so far, so at least there’s a basis for comparison.

A new poll of Harris County voters shows that Alexandra del Moral Mealer and Lina Hidalgo are neck and neck in the race for county judge as early voting begins Monday.

Mealer, a Republican, held a slight lead over the Democratic incumbent Hidalgo, winning 47 percent of likely voters compared to Hidalgo’s 45 percent, according to the new poll from the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

The margin of error in the poll, however, is 3.9 percent, and 8 percent of likely voters were still undecided. That suggests that “the county judge race in Harris County is a statistical dead heat, with del Moral Mealer and Hidalgo effectively tied in regard to the vote intention of Harris County likely voters,” the poll said.

The Hobby School conducted the poll by texting likely Harris County voters and directing them to an online survey, which 625 people filled out.

Poll results show that the county judge contest is significantly closer than the gubernatorial race in Harris County, with Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke holding an 8-percent lead over Republican Greg Abbott.

[…]

Mealer held a 19-percent lead over Hidalgo among white voters, 56 percent of whom said they plan on voting for Mealer. The race is neck and neck among Latino voters, who favor Mealer over Hidalgo 47 percent to 44 percent, within the poll’s margin of error. Black voters overwhelmingly support Hidalgo, the poll said, by a rate of 73 percent to 17 percent.

The Hobby School also polled 350 likely voters in Precinct 4 for their opinions on the commissioner race between Jack Cagle and his Democratic challenger, Lesley Briones. Cagle, the Republican incumbent, leads Briones 40 percent to 35 percent, but 25 percent of likely voters remain undecided, the poll shows.

The poll also indicated that the county’s $1.2 billion bond proposals, supported by county Democrats and opposed by Republicans, could pass a referendum in the November election. The most popular proposal was the most expensive — a $900 million bond for road improvements, including drainage projects. It enjoyed support from 63 percent of likely voters, according to the poll.

See here for their previous poll from July, which had Hidalgo up 48-47 among likely voters, for which the poll data is here. I’ll be referring to that in a minute. The poll’s landing page is here and data for this poll is here. Note that in the early version of this story, the Chron had Cagle up 45-30, but if you look at the poll data document, it’s supposed to be 40-35. A huge number of Democrats in the poll are undecided, so there’s plenty of room for Briones to grow.

The one other sort-of poll of Harris County was the UH-TSU Texas Trends poll from September, which had Hidalgo up by 52-42 and winning Latino voters by a wide margin. This is not a direct comparison, however, because that was a smaller sample (195 voters) taken from a statewide poll. This October poll has a sample size of 625 while the July poll was from 325 voters, which meant the earlier one had a larger margin of error. Hold onto that thought for a minute.

The July poll has a slightly more Republican electorate – 43% Dem, 40% GOP, to 36-30 in this sample, with more independents in October – and basically no self-proclaimed Dems voting for Mealer. The July poll had Beto up over Abbott 51-42 among likely voters, while this one has Beto up 50-42. Assuming nothing weird with the undecided voters, this would have Beto on track for about 54% in Harris County, and we know what that means. This poll says that about 6% of Beto voters are voting for Mealer with 10% of Beto voters undecided; 95% of Abbott voters are voting for Mealer, only 1% for Hidalgo, and the rest undecided.

Taken as a whole, this would suggest that Mealer has had some success chipping away at Hidalgo’s base of support. Maybe that’s true, and if so that would be a key to her winning. I’ve expressed my skepticism about the Latino vote breakdown in these polls before, but the thing that really made me cock and eyebrow this time around was Mealer leading Hidalgo 48-43 among millennial/Gen Z voters; Hidalgo had led among this cohort 52-42 in July. These are the most Democratic voters in the state, and while this is surely a small enough subsample to make comparisons across the two polls dicey at best, I have to say, I find that unlikely. Alas, they don’t break down the Governor’s race data in the same fashion, so I can’t tell if their younger voter sub-population is weird as a whole or just weird in this way. For what it’s worth, in what is an even smaller subsample, Lesley Briones leads Jack Cagle among the younger cohort 33-32, with a bunch of undecideds. Make of that what you will.

Speaking of subsamples and margins of error, this bit from the Chron story made me grind my teeth:

The race is neck and neck among Latino voters, who favor Mealer over Hidalgo 47 percent to 44 percent, within the poll’s margin of error.

Emphasis mine. That’s not how this works. You have to calculate the margin of error for the subsample if you want to invoke it in this way, not the MoE for the entire poll. Latinos were 27% of the sample in this poll, which is about 170 voters total. The margin of error for 170 voters is about 7.5% – just google “margin of error calculator” to see for yourself. This is why you have to be extra careful with subsamples in a poll.

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