Rick beating Bill White by 10 points...

Rick leads by 10 in the latest Texas Tribune poll... he led by 6 in the last Texas Tribune poll (link)...

Republican Gov. Rick Perry leads his Democratic challenger, Bill White by 10 points — 50 percent to 40 percent — in the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, which was conducted in the days leading up to early voting. Libertarian Kathie Glass has the support of 8 percent of respondents; Deb Shafto of the Green Party gets 2 percent.

In the last UT/TT poll, conducted in early September, Perry led by 6 points, 39 percent to 33 percent. That poll also found 22 percent undecided; in this poll, undecided voters were pressed to say which candidate they would choose if the election were held today.

Bill White's negative campaigning backfired and now voters view Bill White's campaign as far more negative than Rick's campaign which is a rare split when it comes to Democrats and Republicans around the country and in Texas. Excerpt follows...

Respondents to the poll say White has run a more negative race than Perry has. They're about tied on whether Perry's campaign has been more positive (43 percent) than negative (45 percent). But only 35 percent say White's campaign has been positive, while 51 percent say it's been negative. Many of the commercials that have aired on White’s behalf weren't his own but were run by either the Back to Basics PAC (financed largely by Houston attorney Steve Mostyn) or by the Democratic Governors Association. Voters didn't fall for it, apparently, blaming White for the attacks on Perry.

This thing is basically over... as I have said all along... it will end up being about a 10 point victory for Rick. The DGA has pulled out of Texas. Back to Basics is somewhat silent. I see far more Rick ads than Bill White ads... Bill White just needs to shuffle away with dignity... but it looks like he is going down fighting... and going down flailing... which will ruin his chances in 2012...

Jason Embry adds some other data that is interesting (link). Excerpt follows...

“As the electorate begins to pay more attention, the numbers at the top of the ticket and in the down-ballot races suggest a predictable pattern of partisan alignment, in which the trends of Republican identification we’ve seen in the last few decades are being amplified by a broader national political environment favorable to Republican candidates,” says Jim Henson, a government professor at UT who oversees the UT/TT poll with his colleague Daron Shaw.

• Thanks to Democratic pollster Jeff Smith of Opinion Analysts, we have some good information on who participated in the first few days of early voting.

Some important caveats to get out of the way: Four days of early voting do not an election make. And just because someone voted in a party’s primary does not mean they will support that party’s candidate for governor or any other office.

OK, now that we’ve said that, Smith has numbers on 54 of the state’s 254 counties, including all the big urban and suburban counties. Of the more than 600,000 people who voted early in these counties in the first four days:

50 percent have at some point voted in a Republican primary.

43 percent have at some point voted in a Democratic primary.

11 percent have at some point voted in a Republican and Democratic primary.

18 percent have no history of voting in primaries.

Perhaps most significantly:

38 percent voted in the 2010 Republican primary.

18 percent voted in the 2010 Democratic primary.

Again, don’t draw too many conclusions. While most of the state’s population is represented in this count, the counties that are or are not represented could tilt toward one party or the other. But if you must take something away from these numbers, it’s fair to say that this is, on the whole, better news for Republicans than Democrats. Maybe much better.

It is getting ugly for Obama and his party in Texas... Rick winning is basically a given at this point, but Chet Edwards losing and some other down ballot liberal peeps losing around the state will be the cherry on top of this election... and then redistricting commences for 2012...