Don't Look Now

But there could, just could, be an upset building in the Texas governor's race.

For months there has been a lot of talk about how Rick Perry (another of those Republicans notable mainly for his hair) was likely to win another term as governor, even though hardly anyone likes him. The problem is that instead of uniting behind one candidate the not-Perry camp fractured into four: Democrat Chris Bell, former Republican Carol Keeton Strayhorn, independent musician and detective novelist Kinky Friedman and Libertarian James Werner. Bell had a hard time starting off, Strayhorn couldn't get significantly over about a quarter of the vote, Friedman was in the teens and Werner in the low single digits; the net result was that it looked like Perry would be re-elected with less than 40 percent of the vote.

Well a new Zogby poll shows that Bell has pulled within 8 points of Perry; the governor's support has fallen slightly, but Bell has picked up 6 points in a short time. Perhaps more important, if this poll is right, Strayhorn's support has fallen to 15 percent and Friedman is just below her. All of which might mean that the Texas voters have decided that neither of them can win, and that some of them are moving toward Bell as a way to deny the governor another term. It's still a long shot, but if that is the case, Bell just might be able to catch Perry at the wire.

(A few notes of caution: My impression--I've never done a systematic study--is that Zogby's polls are not as reliable as others'. Also, a Zogby poll done six days ago showed Perry at 38 percent and Bell at just 22. Has the Democrat really picked up a point a day? Maybe, or maybe the change is a feature of that pesky "margin of error." Other polls from a few days ago don't show the race as close as Zogby's latest one does, either.)