Texas’ recent redistricting has left two current congressmen, Pete Sessions and Martin Frost, slugging it out against each other in a bitterly-contested affair. A poll released today shows Sessions holding a lead only three weeks before the election.
U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions is slightly ahead of his Democratic rival, U.S. Rep. Martin Frost, in one of the nation’s most watched congressional races, according to a newspaper poll of likely voters.
Sessions has 50 percent to Frost’s 44 percent in the survey, which polled 800 likely voters last week for The Dallas Morning News. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
Pollsters randomly selected 32nd Congressional District households with published telephone numbers. The survey was conducted by Iowa-based public opinion firm Selzer & Co.
Frost, Texas’ most senior congressman, was forced to run in Sessions’ Republican-leaning district after Republicans decimated Frost’s district in off-year political remapping.
Frost immediately attacked the poll, contending it undersampled hispanics, who represent over a third of the district’s population.
Representative of the animosity shown throughout this campaign, the Frost camp called Sessions a hypocrite for streaking thirty years ago as a college freshman.
Democrats today circulated old newspaper clippings of a 1974 college streaking stunt staged by hundreds of students at Southwest Texas State University, including an 18-year-old Pete Sessions.
Sessions, a conservative Republican who wrote a column condemning Janet Jackson’s nude display during this year’s Super Bowl halftime performance, apparently bared his bottom with about 300 male and female students on the streets of San Marcos during the two-night rampage.
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Sessions’ campaign isn’t denying the congressman’s public nudeness.
“Congressman Sessions’ old school days are long gone,” said Sessions’ spokesman Chris Homan. “He recognizes it as an immature action of an 18-year-old college freshman.”
But Frost’s campaign is holding Sessions’ bare bod to the fire.
“Pete Sessions exposed himself to children and strangers,” said Frost spokesman Justin Kitsch. “He’s exposed himself as a hypocrite as well.”
Sessions’ spokesman dismissed the comparison of Sessions’ juvenile acts to those of Jackson, who revealed her breast in front of millions of Super Bowl watchers at the finale of a halftime performance with singer Justin Timberlake.
This isn’t exactly the kind of exposure the four-term Republican wants in the final three weeks of a tight race with Frost, a 13-term Democrat. The two incumbents are battling for Republican-leaning Dallas area District 32 in what is expected to be the most expensive race in the country.
There has been much silliness of this sort, as well as more serious allegations, by both sides in this contest. However, decades-old college frivolity is not going to alter Session’s poll lead. As a resident of a nearby district who actually works within the confines of the 32nd, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Sessions will carry the day on Nov. 2.