Even liberal PPP sez Rick headed to reelection over Bill White...

I don't really like PPP polls in Texas. They have not impressed me with some of their findings compared to the actual results... they are usually pretty skewed toward liberals.... so for Rick to be leading Bill White 53-44 in their poll... well... that is a pretty big nail in the coffin for Bill White (link). Excerpt follows...

Rick Perry's in a solid position for reelection as Governor of Texas, leading Bill White 53-44 on PPP's final poll of the race.

For White it may be a classic case of the right candidate running in the wrong cycle. He has strong favorability numbers at a 46/39 spread while Perry can only break even on his approval rating at 45% giving him good marks and 45% bad ones. White leads with independent voters 50-44. That makes him one of very few Democratic candidates anywhere in the country leading with that group this year and it's all the more impressive given that Barack Obama's approval rating with that same ground of independents is a 33/55 spread.

Ultimately though to win as a Democrat in Texas you're going to have to win a fair amount of crossover support from Republican voters and in the end White just wasn't able to do it. Just 11% of GOP voters are planning to support him, a number equivalent to the 11% of Democrats who plan to vote for Perry. In this highly polarized political climate Republicans just aren't particularly inclined to vote for any Democrat, even an unusually appealing one like White.

[SNIP]

It looks like Rick Perry will beat back a strong opponent for the second time this year. There's no politician in the country this year who's defeated a more formidable duo than Kay Bailey Hutchison and Bill White.

Full results here

Rick has indeed faced the gauntlet... the most hotly contested primary in the history of the state... the battle of the giants... turned out to be a 21 point blow out for Rick... and the most hotly contested governor's race in modern Texas history is also turning into a rout....

Bill White ran a bad campaign. Hey but they did spend a hundred grand on things like buying Facebook fans... so they could crow about having more Facebook fans while being smothered on television by Rick in the final two or three weeks because he ran out of money. Good strategy guys... good strategy... Another good strategy was buying hundreds of thousands of dollars in newspaper ads... nobody reads those things anymore... he also raised a lot of money in small lumps from a lot of peeps... but I would just guess that he spent a lot more on postage and printing... and web ads... than he raised off his small direct mail asks... in other words they spent a lot on things so they could come back later and say hey we have a lot of Facebook fans... or we have a lot of small donors... those were not organic... they were not indicative of real grassroots support...

Bill White's campaign had all the resources and the entire state Democrat establishment behind him... he walked into a divided GOP electorate in the wake of the sometimes bitter primary... and he faced a decade long incumbent with a long record in an anti incumbent year... but Rick's peeps are just better than Bill White's peeps, and Rick is just better than Bill White.

That goes up and down the list... fund raisers... communications peeps... researchers... internet peeps... field teams... grassroots outreach... event planners... in every way Rick has outshined Bill White.. even as the press has played obvious favorites and behaved unethically, Bill White has not moved beyond the Obama Texas base... In recent days I have seen a lot of talk from Bill White's team about how much better their ground game is than Rick's ground game... how disconcerting must it be for them for Rick to have no yard signs and no direct mail and no physical offices everywhere but still be destroying them...

It is guerrilla warfare at its finest. Psychological ops... Bill White throws up a fort that is easy to assail... Rick has safe houses on every block...

Let me just say "we have a better ground game, the polls are wrong" never turns out to be true... ever...

There is no evidence of Bill White having a better ground game. None... unless you also submit to the idea that Kay had a better ground game in the primary which is just as off the wall...

There may be no better campaign structure in America that Rick's cohesive team...

Bill White also may be one of the most over rated politicians I have ever seen... if he runs again in 2012 I think he will have an even harder time getting any traction... he is just so ugly and mean spirited... and there is plenty of material out there from Rick's peeps... as well as plenty of material I am sure they held their fire on...