The 16-point lead is a campaign's own poll. No independent survey of this race has been released.

A poll showing Letitia Plummer up 16 points on Orlando Sanchez was paid for by the Plummer campaign. No independent public poll of this race has been released, and the Sanchez campaign answered it with a number backed by nothing at all.

Why it matters

Harris County will pick a county judge in November who signs off on a budget north of $2 billion and sets the property tax rate. Voters deciding whether the race is close are working from one survey, and the campaign that commissioned it is the one that released it.

By the numbers

53 percent Plummer, 37 percent Sanchez, 9 percent undecided on the first ballot question
58 percent Plummer, 36 percent Sanchez after respondents were read biographical information about the candidates
600 likely general election voters surveyed by HIT Strategies
August 14 to 20, 2026, the field dates
Zero margin of error published in any account of the poll reviewed for this piece, and no crosstabs or questionnaire released

What the coverage buried

The number that traveled was 53 to 37. The number that explains what the survey was for is 58 to 36.

That second figure came after respondents heard biographical information about each candidate. A ballot test taken after voters are read a candidate’s resume is a message test. It tells a campaign which script moves people, which is a reasonable thing to buy and a poor thing to quote as the standing of the race. Houston Style Magazine published both numbers. The headline figure was the first one.

Not one account reviewed for this piece published a margin of error. On a sample of 600 that figure is roughly plus or minus four points, and a reader cannot check that without it.

The other side

Internal polls are not automatically wrong. Campaigns buy them to allocate money, and a firm that flatters its client into a bad spending plan loses the account. HIT Strategies is an established Washington firm. Six hundred likely voters is a normal sample for a countywide race. The campaign released its sample size and its field dates, which is more disclosure than many internal polls get.

Two things still hold. It released the sample size and the dates and not the questionnaire, the crosstabs or the margin of error, and the figure it put in the release is the one taken before the informed ballot. And the response from the other side was weaker, not stronger: the Sanchez campaign disputed the result and asserted Plummer’s real support is under 50 percent without releasing a survey of its own. An unsupported counterclaim is not a correction.

Two academics quoted in the coverage said roughly the same thing from different directions. Mark Jones of Rice University noted that campaign-released polls serve fundraising. Renee Cross of the University of Houston said a 16-point margin sits far above what recent Harris County judge races have produced.

What to watch

Whether either campaign releases crosstabs, a questionnaire and a margin of error. Either one could do it this week
Whether any independent public poll of the general election appears. The University of Houston’s Hobby School polled the primary in May
The candidate debate that ended after about 10 minutes on September 8 has not been rescheduled, and organizers have not announced a new date
Early voting begins in October, which is when internal polls are typically released in volume by both parties

Bottom line

The poll is real, the firm is real, and the coverage labeled it as a campaign poll. What does not follow is treating 53 to 37 as the state of the race. Until somebody independent puts a survey in the field, both campaigns are describing an election that nobody has measured.

Sources

Editorial