Damn!
Hillary Clinton
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has one of his slimmest leads yet over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in Texas, 41 percent to 38 percent, according to a new poll among registered voters. Trump’s support falls within the survey’s margin of error, which is plus- or minus 3 percent, meaning the race is a statistical dead heat.
Released Tuesday by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, the poll also found that 16 percent of respondents were undecided or refused to answer. Four percent chose Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson and 1 percent selected Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
“The national gains Hillary Clinton has made in the last two weeks are evident in Texas, where she has closed within three points of Donald Trump,” said Richard Murray, political science professor and director of the Hobby School’s Survey Research Institute. “With such a close margin, the key question will be which candidate can actually get their supporters to the polls over the next three weeks.”
Trump’s lead jumps one point – to 4 percent – when the poll considered voters who said they were certain to vote on or before Election Day. Among independent voters in Texas, Clinton dominates Trump, 30 percent to 14 percent. The GOP candidate, however, won the support of a plurality of male respondents, 44 percent to Clinton’s 35 percent, while women support Clinton by a four-point margin, 42 percent to 38 percent.
There’s also another WaPo/Survey Monkey poll that shows Trump up 2, 48-46. That same poll had Clinton up 46-45 in early September. I’m not putting too much weight into this because its methodology is weird, but for those of you that saw news of this poll, I’m letting you know that I saw it as well. Here’s the info for the UH poll. I’ll quote from their intro:
The Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston completed live telephone interviews with 1,000 registered voters in Texas who reported they were certain (77 percent) or very likely to vote (23 percent) on or before election day on November 8, 2016.
Interviews were conducted by Consumer Research International between October 7 and October 15, 2016. Interviews were conducted on landline (54 percent) and cell phones (46percent).The margin of error for the survey is +/- 3 percent (at the 95 percent confidence level). The survey was conducted under the supervision of co-directors Richard Murray, director of the Hobby School’s Survey Research Institute, and Robert Stein, research associate at the Hobby School.
The sample was weighted to reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the electorate based on the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.
This is consistent with their earlier poll of Harris County that showed Clinton with a lead. As I said then, you can’t have Trump leading the state by less than half of Mitt Romney’s margin – hell, less than half of John McCain’s margin – and not see that reflected at the local level as well. One could argue that the composition of the Texas electorate this year will be more favorable to Democrats this year than 2012 and possibly 2008 were, but we’ll leave that discussion for after the election. In any event, a few quick points to make here:
– I can’t overstate how shocking it is to see a Republican candidate in Texas in a top-of-the-ticket race score only 41% in a poll in October. Forget the three-point margin for a minute, how is it that Trump so consistently can’t even come close to fifty percent?
– Even worse from Trump’s perspective is there’s not that much room for him to grow. He and Clinton have about the same share of their own voters – 80% of Dems say they support Clinton, 78% of GOPers are with Trump. More to the point, here aren’t a lot of undecided Republicans out there – twelve percent fall under None, Don’t Know, or Refused, while 14% of Dems are in one of those buckets. Trump does lose more of his own voters than Clinton does – ten percent of Republicans are voting for someone else (5% Johnson, 5% Clinton) while only five percent of Democrats are defecting (2% Trump, 2% Johnson, 1% Stein). Maybe some of them will come home for him.
– There’s a large share of undecided independents (29%), but 1) Clinton leads 30-14 among indies who do have a preference, 2) we don’t know how big a slice of the sample indies are, and 3) these are probably your least likely voters in the sample.
– Unfortunately, the provided poll data does not include breakdowns by age or by race. I’d bet that Clinton leads among voters under 50, as has been the case in other polls, but I can’t confirm that based on what we have.
– FiveThirtyEight has this poll incorporated into their data set for Texas, but as of this writing Real Clear Politics had not noticed it. You should also read this 538 post about the poll and why Clinton is doing as well as she is in red states overall and Texas in particular.
I’ll have some more thoughts on the state of the polls tomorrow.
What surprises me is that Gary Johnson is only at 4%.
Looks like the Libertarian party may miss out on ballot access if they don’t get a statewide candidate at +5%. I haven’t heard of any of their other Texas statewide position candidates getting +5% in polling, but then again I doubt any exists.
Those darn women could carry it for Hillary;-)
We made such a big mistake with the 19th Amendment…damn suffragettes!
I wish Ted Cruz was up for election this year.
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