For the last couple of days, the local buzz in CD-22 has been about a new poll commissioned by KHOU TV and the Houston Chronicle. The bottom line is that Sekula-Gibbs went up and Lampson and Smither dropped from other recent polling.

To begin, we tried to devise a survey which would not reflect voter intent, but what voters might actually do on Election Day. It's an impossible task with a write-in campaign. When KHOU announced the poll results on the evening news, they went through a big disclaimer about how difficult or perhaps impossible it is.

It seems that people are disputing the results already. From a national perspective, Chris Bowers wrote:

But write-ins are not the same as Gibbs. The poll shows that 79% of write-in voters intend to vote for Gibbs. It also shows that only two-thirds of those voters know how to conduct a write-in. With those two factors taken into account, Lampson is actually doubling up Gibbs 36-19. But hey, Zogby wasn't commissioned to make a boring poll.

Local opinion is more important, as these guys are on the ground and actually talk with local voters on a daily basis. One local angle provides a series of items to consider. Here's the first:

So it sounds like Shelley might have 35% of the vote and Nick has 36%, right?

But the actual poll results seem to paint a different picture. Consider:

- Out of 504 voters polled, 184 - 36.5% - said they were not aware anyone is running as a write-in candidate in the CD-22 race.

Here's another local view:

- 26% of Republicans (69 out of 262) and 24% of Independents (19 out of 81) say they're not sure who they're voting for. It's hard to judge what they might eventually do. In a subsequent question that named Sekula Gibbs on the ballot, the 61 "not sure"s were pushed, but only 18 then identified a candidate. No such pushing was done for the Lampson/Smither/Write In question, where there were twice as many (123) "not sure"s. One might surmise that these are the people least likely to vote.

- It's hard to believe that Bob Smither will get only 4% of the vote. Past history suggests that Libertarian candidates, when they share a ballot with only one major party contestant, get 10-15% of the vote. My guess is that Smither will pick up a number of the not-sure voters, probably more Republicans since those are the ones he's specifically targetting.

I tend to take much more stock in longer rolling polls than in one time major polls with lower margins of error. This gives me a view of how events, advertising, media coverage and ground campaign activities are effecting the mood of the voters. I'm treating this poll as just one in a series of polls where Smither and Sekula-Gibbs tend to fluctuate weekly.

This poll happened towards the end of a very major media blitz by Sekula-Gibbs (paid mostly with national money). Lampson dropped a little and Smither dropped even more, that is too be expected.

I'm now seeing more Lampson ads (I assume he made another media buy) and a lot of the Smither advertising begins today. 25 percent of the voters are still undecided, and some leaning towards the Republican will certainly sway as Smither advertsing kicks into high gear this week.

They may have just scored a couple of points, but the fourth quarter just started and we've just gained possession of the football.