Rasmussen giveth, and Rasmussen taketh away.
Sen. Wendy Davis
Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Abbott leads Democratic opponent Wendy Davis by 11 percentage points among likely voters with a month until Election Day, according to a newly released Rasmussen Reports poll.
The gap was enough to spur the conservative-leaning firm to shift the race from “Leans Republican” to “Safe Republican” on its scorecard of this year’s gubernatorial contests. Davis is a state senator from Fort Worth; Abbott is the outgoing attorney general.
The poll was conducted over two days immediately following the candidates’ second and final debate in Dallas on Tuesday. Among likely voters surveyed, 51 percent favored Abbott and 40 percent supported Davis. Seven percent were undecided, and 3 percent picked another candidate. The margin was slightly larger, at 12 points, among those who said they would definitely vote come Election Day on Nov. 4.
Those with “very unfavorable” views of Davis stood unchanged at 33 percent, while Abbott’s jumped slightly from 15 to 18 percent. Abbott also lead his opponent by 12 points or more on how much those polled felt they could trust the candidates to handle four key policy issues: government spending, taxes, social issues, and government ethics and corruption.
Most surveys this year have shown Abbott leading Davis by double digits. Rasmussen’s polling data has yielded yo-yoing results for the two candidates: the firm’s last poll in August showed the Republican with just an 8-point advantage; in March, Abbott led by 12 points. The nonpartisan Texas Lyceum released a poll Wednesday that gave Abbott a 9-point lead.
As before, Rasmussen doesn’t release crosstabs, so who knows what caused this little bit of motion. I didn’t get too worked up over the previous poll they put out, and I’m not going to get too worked up over this one, either. We know Abbott’s leading, and we know what we need to do to try to change that. Not much else to say.