Concerned Citizens

The Burnt Orange Report and Off the Kuff posted about a recent poll conducted by Annise Parker’s mayoral campaign that listed her in the lead in the Houston mayoral race. In comments about the poll the subject of name recognition came up several times. An analysis memo provided by Rindy Miller Media claimed that the name recognition alone garnered Parker a one to two million dollar advantage over her challengers. While that may seem a little overstated it does beg the question about how much value name recognition plays in a campaign these days.

Other posts within BOR focusing on the Texas gubernatorial race have cited the need for name recognition of a Democratic challenger to be able to fairly compete with either Gov. Rick Perry or US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchision. While many progressive Democrats like to hold their local heroes up like State Rep. Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas) or State Sen. Leticia Van De Putte (D-San Antonio) the issue is that these candidates do not carry statewide recognition and would have to spend large sums of money in the Texas media market to come up to speed with the Republican candidate, whoever it turns out to be. That allows the R candidate to use the money and time to distance the D candidate on many aspects.

In San Antonio a similar situation is occurring within the mayoral race. Three candidates are vying for the top post in the city. Julian Castro carries a lot of recognition, both from his term as city council member and from his last mayoral bid against current Mayor Phil Hardberger. Castro lost the race in a runoff but just that run in itself should be counted as early money for his current campaign. Having a twin brother in the Texas House doesn’t hurt either. Castro is benefiting from name recognition in this race.

The other two challengers have name recognition issues of their own. Trish DeBerry-Mejia is known within political circles from all her work over the years on campaigns. However she is not well known across the city and is having to spend early money to get the name out. She has already launched two television ads to raise the awareness so it is probably safe to say her war chest has been seriously dented early in the race. She had to do it to overcome the deficit of little recognition.

Dianne Cibrian suffers from a different kind of name recognition in that voters have seen her in the news far too much and view her as a grandstander. In other words voters know her but in a negative sort of way. News reports of her ties to developers last year also helped create a negative tone for her name. She will have to spend lots of money to repair the name issue which has already shown its affect in recent viewer polls by WOAI as reported by the San Antonio Mayor blog. Once again, early money with no purpose other than to attempt to level the field early in the race.

In the gubernatorial race there has been discussion in Democratic circles of finding a name candidate for the position. Henry Cisneros has been floated as a possible contender against the eventual R hairdo candidate that comes out of the primary. However, as discussed at BOR, there are positive and negative issues associated with his name in the race due to his payments to a mistress and the indictments while he served as HUD secretary for Pres. Clinton.

So in the end name recognition can play to your advantage or against you. The point is that in this day and age of 24/7 news cycles and electronic media the name can sometimes speak for itself.