And the rest

I suppose it’s not fair to talk about the possibility of a runoff in the Republican gubernatorial primary without discussing the prospects for same in the Democratic primary. We don’t have any polling in this race as yet, and frankly even if we did I’d be suspicious of it, just because I doubt any pollster has much of a track record in this kind of Democratic primary here, so this is little more than guesswork. As BOR notes, Dr. Murray thinks Bill White will win outright. There’s certainly a decent chance of that, and you should read each of their analyses for why, but who knows what effect Farouk Shami’s TV advertising will have. Plus, as the Trib and the Chron have noted, there are five other candidates in the running (though one of them is doing double duty), and they don’t need to collect too much support to make it hard for anyone to cross 50%. An average of 4% each adds up to 20% overall, meaning that if Shami can top 30%, we go into overtime. As noted before, I’m wondering when White will start to appear on the air. Early voting begins in less than four weeks, so time is getting very short.

Related Posts:

• The UT/TT poll’s track record in past Democratic primaries
• Some opening thoughts on the 2022 election
• State and county election result relationships, part 2: Judicial races