The Gossips are amazed at the turnout in the first two days of early voting in Texas. Thanks to Ed Martin for the following: "In top 15 counties (by population), which includes all major suburban counties (Ft. Bend is 2-1 Democratic and Denton, Collin and Williamson have higher D turnout). In all 15 counties, D's outvoting R's at a 3-1 rate - 118, 756 D to 38,251 R. Only in Montgomery co. are R's outvoting D's ".

But while that is indeed interesting note the following:

"In top 5 counties, about 40% of D voters have no primary history (0 of 3) and about 20% have only voted in one or no general elections in 2002, 2004, 2006 ". What that means is a lot of new voters with no history of voting before or limited history and they are turning out for the top of the ticket and may have no idea who to vote for in the downballot races. If you have a great name...Gene Kelly or Sam Houston you may be in good shape. But the Gossip would be worried if I was manageing the campaigns for Andres Periera or Silvia Pubchara, to name just two fine candidates running for Judge in Harris County with names that might not be recoginized.

And the Gossip watched the Houston rally for Barack Obama on Tuesday night and thought the crowd was a great mixture of races and sexes. Lots of young folks and even a few old white haired people like former Governor Mark White.

Last night we saw Chris Bell with former Prez Bill Clinton and today we read where Chris has endorsed Hillary. The Gossips wonder if the Obama folks asked for Bell's endorsement. Senator Clinton has also been endorsed by Ken Bentsen. The Gossips wonder if the other former Congressman from the old 25thCD, Mike Andrews is also on her team. The present Congressman, Al Green is with Obama.

--0-73205936-1203634575=:28748 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit