As the 2012 election year begins to heat up, pollster, pundit and political science professor Richard Murray will again delight and enlighten The Houston Seminar audience on who will rise, who will wait and why we care.

Home in Houston, first-term mayor Annise Parker faces re-election; two City Council seats have been added; former State Representative Ellen 

Cohen has announced her candidacy for City Council.

What will happen when a Texas statehouse Republican supermajority with seats to defend gets hold of the 2010 Census data? Will a Democratic Department of Justice play as big a role as did Tom DeLay when he targeted every Texas Democrat in Congress in 2003? Or will the Texas GOP take its redistricting plan directly to the courts? Who will emerge as the Republican candidate for the Presidency? 

Few people will have more information relevant to the 2011 and 2012 elections than Dr. Murray, and no one can pull that information into a coherent and entertaining lecture series better than he. 

Richard Murray is the Bob Lanier Professor of Urban Public Policy and director of surveying for the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston, where an endowed scholarship in his name was established in 2008.