Analyst Dissects Mayoral Race Outcome

HOUSTON - If you'd listen to the polls Peter Brown should be one step closer to picking out the office colors at City Hall. But he's not.

Many of the independent political polls who tried to predict what voters would decide were dead wrong.

Those polls indicated Gene Locke would be the odd man out. Instead he's in a runoff with Annise Parker.

So how did the pollsters get it so wrong?

"You got 30 percent of the electorate going on name ID; Peter Brown spends nearly 4 million and you got a lot of people going, ‘Brown! Brown! Brown!’ but those people who responded didn't vote," Political Analyst Chris Begala says.

The mayor's race set for Dec. 12 with two people.

Locke, who has been the king of fundraising, raised nearly $3 million on his own.

Parker knows that.

She sent out an email to her supporters asking for their help to raise $1 million dollars in five weeks.

Begala says she will need it in the runoff which is further out than in the past.

While Parker is going after money, Locke has already made it clear he's going after more voters—especially the supporters of Brown, another democrat, and Roy Morales’ republican base.

"They're going to spend about a million and a half dollars chasing about 20,000 conservative voters," Begala says.

Those are voters Begala believes won't even come out for the runoff, a race he anticipates only a dismal 10 percent of the registered voters will show up for. That would be 9 percent less than the General election.