Letitia Plummer
Letitia Plummer released an internal poll Tuesday that shows her leading Republican Orlando Sanchez by double digits in the race for Harris County Judge.
Plummer, a Democrat and former Houston City Council Member, led Sanchez 53% to 37% in the survey conducted by the Washington-based HIT Strategies. Nine percent of voters were undecided.
Republicans are hoping for a competitive race in November after eight years under progressive Judge Lina Hidalgo, who is not seeking reelection. Plummer’s pollster believes that growing dissatisfaction with Republican leaders at the top of the ticket, however, presents Sanchez with an uphill battle.
“With (Plummer’s) support still growing and Sanchez’s allies deeply unpopular with Harris County voters, this race represents a real opportunity,” said HIT Strategies President Terrance Woodbury, in a statement. “Her win can, and will, help power turnout for the entire Democratic ticket.”
The Sanchez campaign, in a statement, said that releasing paid, internal polling data reflects growing nerves on Plummer’s team, and that her “real” numbers are likely below 50%.
“This race is about Harris County but the Plummer campaign wants to hide her failed record and make this about Democrats versus Republicans,” said campaign spokesman Chris Beavers. “Voters know it’s about competence versus corruption.”
HIT Strategies conducted the poll over a week in mid-August among a sample of 600 likely general election voters in Harris County. It was released publicly Tuesday, a day after a virtual debate between Plummer and Sanchez was postponed due to technical difficulties.
Renée Cross, who leads the University of Houston’s political polling efforts, said the poll boasts a decent sample size but lacks demographic data, making it difficult to draw broad conclusions about its results.
Cross expects Plummer to win, but said a 16-point lead may be far-fetched given the slim margins of Democratic victories in the 2018 and 2022 races for county judge.
“I would expect the Democrat to do much better this year because the tide is going toward blue rather than red in this particular election,” Cross said. “But (16 points) is a lot in a county that is maybe blue, but not dark blue.”
The Plummer poll found that likely voters have soured on GOP leaders, with more than 60% of respondents viewing President Donald Trump unfavorably.
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Mark Jones, a Rice University political scientist who conducts political polls with Texas Southern University, said partisan polls are often useful fundraising vehicles if the data reflects well on the candidate who commissioned it.
“It’s a poll with a goal and a mission, and that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect — the results it presents are very plausible,” Jones said. “(But) it’s being done for a campaign with an express goal.”
This is an internal poll and we don’t have access to its data, so we don’t need to dig into it. The reason to be wary of internal polls is not that they’re poorly designed or executed but that they only see the light of day if the candidate or campaign that commissioned it chooses to release it, and so you see what they want to be seen and not what they don’t. That said, when the bulk of the internal polls released come from one side, that does tell you something about the overall environment, which in this case is already known and is why Prof. Jones considers it a plausible result. You will note that the Orlando Sanchez campaign, which is surely doing its own polling or has access to polling done by other aligned groups, didn’t counter with their own data. That in and of itself tells you something.
I would frame this poll with two questions to consider. The first is, by how much do you think James Talarico will win Harris County? In 2018, Beto O’Rourke beat Ted Cruz in Harris County 58.0 to 41.3, or about a point more than Plummer is leading Sanchez in this poll. How likely do you think Talarico, who is sure to be the Democratic pacesetter, is to do better than that? Remember that as I’ve shown before, in recent elections Democratic candidates have run about nine points better in Harris County than they have statewide. If Talarico is going to win statewide, as polls indicate he could, that suggests his Harris County number would need to be probably at least 59 percent. None of this is set in stone, and of course the state polls may be overstating Talarico’s performance, but the point is that the Plummer +16 number doesn’t come from a vacuum and isn’t out of kilter with observed reality. It may or may not be right, but it is indeed plausible.
The second question is how much bigger will Talarico’s margin be than Plummer’s? Obviously, Beto, who won Harris County in 2018 by 16.7 points and 200K votes, did a hell of a lot better than Lina Hidalgo, who won by 1.6 points and 20K votes. Some of that was Beto’s crossover appeal – he had 16K more votes than the next-highest-scoring Democrat, while Ted Cruz was the second-worst performer among Republicans. (The worst was none other than Ken Paxton, who received four thousand fewer votes than Cruz.) But a lot of it was Ed Emmett’s crossover appeal. Not only was he the top Republican votegetter in 2018, besting Greg Abbott by 16K votes and the third-place Republican (from a judicial race) by 29K, he had been the top Republican votegetter in 2008 and 2010 as well (he didn’t have a Democratic opponent in 2014, so he didn’t qualify for that designation then). We’ll see how Talarico does compared to Beto, but I do not expect Orlando Sanchez to perform like Ed Emmett. Talarico at plus 19 outperforming Plummer by five or six (Beto outdid Lupe Valdez by six in 2018) puts her at +13 or +14, which again makes a 16-point lead in a poll a plausible result.
And that’s really all there is to it. Not that this one internal poll is The Truth – no poll ever is – just that it doesn’t stand out as being silly. Maybe it’s a stretch – if you wanted to bet the under, I would not try to talk you out of it – but there’s no reason to think it’s an illusion. Other polls may say differently, and if they do that’s fine. Better to have more data than less. But until or unless enough other data arises to show this is an outlier, it’s just another data point. Make of it what you will.
I think the Harris County margins this year may be high enough to win the Courts of Appeals for the first time since 2018.