Colin Allred
The Texas Senate race remains close just a week out from early voting, with U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz up 4 percentage points over U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, according to a new statewide poll.
The Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston survey found nearly enough voters remained undecided to make up the 51-46 difference in the Senate race, with 3% saying they still had not made up their mind between the two-term Republican senator and Dallas Democrat challenging him.
[…]
The Hobby poll comes as the Senate Leadership Fund, the GOP super PAC working to flip control of the chamber, found Cruz led Allred by just 1 point, according to an internal memo obtained by Politico.
The top of the ticket was close, as well, with former President Donald Trump holding a 5 percentage point lead over Vice President Kamala Harris, 51-46. Just 2% remained undecided in the presidential race.
The Chron’s reporting of the race as 51-46 for Cruz is a typo – the Hobby Center landing page, their media release for the poll, and their full polling memo all have it at 50-46. These things happen.
A few points to note:
– Allred is tied with Kamala Harris, while Cruz is a point behind Trump. That’s a bit of a deviation from most other polls in which Allred has run ahead of Harris and Cruz behind Trump. This is one data point and it’s not that much of a deviation. I’m just making an observation.
– This poll has Trump a point ahead of Harris with Latino voters, and Allred up by three over Cruz with Latino voters. A brief check of FiveThirtyEight suggests that this is not far out of line with other recent poll results. It is quite a bit out of line with the two polls we have seen that have focused specifically on Latino voters in Texas. I’m going to say what I was saying in 2020, which is that at least one of these is wrong. We’ll see who is closer to the mark.
– On the flip side of that, the UH-Hobby poll has Harris getting 38% of white voters, with Trump getting 60%; the same margin exists in the Allred-Cruz race. That as much as anything explains why this polling is tighter than polling we had seen in the past. A lot of the links for past polling that I have are now broken, but here are two that still work:
YouGov, October 31-November 3, 2012: Among white voters, Mitt Romney leads Barack Obama by a margin of 70-25 (page 2).
CBS News, October 23, 2016: Among white voters, Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by a margin of 63-26 (page 18 of 71).
For many good reasons, lots of attention has been paid to trends in Latino voting in Texas and elsewhere. But as I have said, you can’t explain the big steps forward that Texas Democrats have made since 2016 without noting that a lot of people who used to vote Republican are now voting Democratic, and that necessarily means that a lot of white people who used to vote Republican are now voting Democratic. As with my observation above about the Latino poll numbers, the same is true for white voters, as Harris is getting between 34 and 38 percent in the latest polls listed. If she can get to 40%, I think she can win in Texas. Easier said than done, to be sure. But it’s a lot less crazy to contemplate now than it was not that long ago.
– I assume we’ll see some more polls by Texas pollsters soon. I’m hopeful we’ll also see a decent poll of the HISD bond referendum. Show me the results, UH-Hobby Center.
– In re: the Republican concern about the Allred-Cruz race, enjoy the worrying and the whining. It may ultimately come to nothing, but it’s fun while it lasts.
Lewis Black on undecided voters—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY12SbF3J_4
I very much appreciated Allred calling out Cruz on his attempted ratfuckery. I have family in Tucson.