Another discouraging poll from PPP.
Sen. Wendy Davis
In the Governor’s race Greg Abbott’s at 51% to 37% for Wendy Davis. Those numbers are largely unchanged from our last poll of the state in early November when Abbott had a 50/35 advantage. Davis had a 39/29 favorability rating right after her famous filibuster last June, but since then voters in the state have mostly moved toward having negative opinions about her and now she’s at a 33/47 spread. Davis’ name recognition is actually 12 points higher than Abbott’s, but his reviews break down favorably with 40% having a positive view of him to 27% with a negative one.
One thing that may be working to Abbott’s benefit is that for the first time ever in PPP’s Texas polling Rick Perry has a positive approval rating, with 48% of voters approving of him to 44% who disapprove. Perry’s net approval has improved 18 points from where it was 2 years ago at this time in the wake of his failed Presidential bid, when only 39% of voters gave him good marks with 53% disapproving.
There’s been some thought that Democratic prospects might be better in the race for Lieutenant Governor but Leticia Van de Putte actually trails by slightly more than Davis, regardless of who her Republican opponent ends up being. Dan Patrick leads her by 16 points at 51/35 and incumbent David Dewhurst leads her by 18 points at 50/32. Even with a divisive Republican nomination fight between Patrick and Dewhurst there doesn’t appear to be much risk of the party failing to unify before the fall- they lead 83/9 and 82/5 respectively with GOP voters in the general election.
Although it hasn’t really been on anyone’s radar screen the likely US Senate match up between John Cornyn and David Alameel is actually just about as competitive as the state races. Cornyn leads the contest 49/32. Cornyn is not particularly popular, sporting a 31/40 approval rating. That’s largely because Republican voters are pretty tepid toward him- a 46/27 spread- he’s lucky that he got Steve Stockman instead of a more serious challenger in the GOP primary last month.
We also looked at the race for Land Commissioner and it looks like the Bushes should be back in statewide office in Texas- George P. Bush leads Democratic opponent John Cook 50/32.
Last November, PPP had Abbott up 50-35, so this represents little change since then. You can see the full poll memo here. There are two things I want to note here, the first of which was captured by Michael Li on Facebook, which is that there are a lot more undecided voters among Hispanic and African-American voters than there are among Anglo voters, which suggests this poll is underestimating Davis’ true level of support. Another way of looking at this is to compare this poll with the PPP polls from June 2010, which had Bill White tied with Rick Perry at 43-43, and from October 2010, which had White losing 53-44, not far off from the final result. I’ll throw in the November result as well. I’m going to highlight the results by race and by partisan ID:
Candidate Anglo Hispanic Af-Am Dem Rep Ind
=========================================================
Perry 6/10 55 21 7 10 74 36
White 6/10 35 55 70 76 15 42
Undecided 10 24 23 14 11 22
Perry 10/10 65 38 11 11 88 44
White 10/10 34 55 85 87 11 50
Undecided 1 7 4 3 1 6
Abbott 11/13 60 43 12 18 81 44
Davis 11/13 28 38 62 65 6 44
Undecided 12 19 26 17 14 13
Abbott 4/14 65 33 11 14 84 40
Davis 4/14 27 43 72 74 8 40
Undecided 8 24 17 12 8 20
By these results, Davis has a fair amount of room to grow among her own voters, and she has already done so to some extent from November. Other Dems had basically the same breakdowns as Davis, so the diagnosis I’d give is “it’s too early for a lot of folks to be thinking about this”. I don’t want to read too much into the variations among small subsamples, but I think it’s reasonable to say that a sizable majority of the undecided voters are those that would lean towards her. So just as the June 2010 poll underestimated Rick Perry’s support, based on the Anglo and Republican numbers, I suggest this poll underestimates Davis’ true level.
Of course, she would need more than that to make up this gap, which is where point #2 comes in. Point #2 is, of course, turnout. As we’ve discussed ad infinitum, Republican turnout has varied wildly over the past three off-year elections, while Dem turnout has been consistently and depressingly flat. This year, Battleground Texas is in operation, doing the sort of grassroots GOTV work that we haven’t seen for Dems in forever and which the Republicans are doing their best to unskew. Turnout models matter a lot for this kind of election, and this year especially they’re anybody’s guess. We won’t know how well BGTX has done until the votes are counted, and for something like this it’s pure speculation to assign it a value. I’ll say this much – they could add 500,000 base Democratic votes to the bottom line, which would be about a 30% increase in base turnout and one hell of an impressive achievement, but it would still fall below Republican base turnout even for a low tide year like 2006. They could do better than that, and the candidates like Davis and Van de Putte can work to pick off voters from their opponents, but BGTX could also easily fall short of this, and the other side can make their case to our voters, too. We just don’t know. What I do know is there’s still a lot of work to be done, so don’t go flinging yourself out any windows, and keep those gloom and doom predictions to a minimum. BOR and EoW have more.
I find amazing that Perry’s support has been going UP !? Seriously, what do you have to do as a governor in Texas to alienate voters that Perry hasn’t already done I guess in my liberal bubble I am incapable of understanding these things.