New pollster alert, checking in on Bexar County.
A survey conducted by the UTSA Center for Public Opinion Research suggests San Antonio residents are tepid about plans for a new sports complex for the San Antonio Spurs — a project that city and county leaders have been quietly discussing.
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The survey tested the 2024 presidential race and found Vice President Kamala Harris (D) taking 53.4% and former President Donald Trump (R) taking 34.8% in deep blue Bexar County. Support for Harris was much higher than it was for President Joe Biden when UTSA conducted the same survey in June.
In 2020, Trump took 40% of the vote here, compared to Biden’s 58%.
“We see evidence of support for Democrat candidates surging among Bexar County voters, up and down the ballot,” Gervais said.
In the U.S. Senate race, Republican Ted Cruz (R) was taking 29.1% to Democrat Colin Allred’s (D) 44%. Statewide polling in this race has shown Cruz up between 3 and 5 percentage points in recent weeks.
The story actually says that Biden got 48% in Bexar County in 2020, but that’s an obvious typo. Links to the three (so far) UTSA Center for Public Opinion Research polls are here. To give some idea of how much things have changed since June, the numbers then were Biden 39.8% to Trump 36.0%; in the Senate race it was Allred with 36.8% and Ted Cruz with 30.7%. “Don’t know” was a significant portion of each group, which likely reflected a combination of “it’s too early for me to think about this” and “oh god, do I really have to?”. Suffice it to say things are different now.
Couple things to note. One is that “Don’t know” is still a significant group in each result, 10% for the Presidential race and 20% for the Senate race. If you extrapolate out – always a bit of tricky business – you get something like 59-38 for Harris and 56-41 for Allred. Both are improvements over 2020 – MJ Hegar beat John Cornyn 54.6 to 42.5 in Bexar County in 2020 – and as such augur well for November. That doesn’t mean that Harris will necessarily do better than Biden did in 2020 – I would expect plenty of the red counties from 2020 to perform better for Trump this year – but it’s only possible for Harris to outperform Biden if she is outrunning his performance in places like Bexar County. A necessary condition, if not a sufficient one.
Also, this is a poll where Harris and Trump outperform both Senate candidates, which makes it a little different from other recent polls. Again, don’t read too much into that – this is one poll, of one specific part of the state – I’m just noting it for the record. This group has one more poll in the works for October, so we’ll see what that one says. Probably fewer “Don’t know” responses, and probably most of them by then can be considered less likely to vote, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Texas Public Radio has more.