Not Ted Cruz
Texas U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democrats’ top hope of toppling Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, starts the year at a significant polling disadvantage, according to a new survey released Tuesday by the Cruz campaign.
O’Rourke, a three-term congressman from El Paso, trails Cruz among likely Texas voters by an 18-point margin, or 52-percent to 34-percent, according to the poll conducted by WPA Intelligence, a firm headed by Cruz advisor Chris Wilson. Some 13 percent were undecided.
The poll also shows a significant name-recognition deficit for O’Rourke, who was elected to Congress in 2012, the same year Cruz was elected to the Senate. Only 32 percent of poll respondents contacted in December had heard of him, compared to 99 percent for Cruz, who ran for president in 2016.
Cruz clocked in with a favorability rating of 50 percent, while 42 percent of likely voters have an unfavorable opinion of the senator. For O’Rourke, 14 percent of those who had heard of him have a favorable view, while 7 percent said they have an unfavorable view.
The poll is from a month ago, not that I think that makes any difference. Wilson Perkins is as noted a GOP-aligned firm, and they did a fairly accurate Presidential poll in 2012, so they’re not a fly-by-night outfit. That said, there are a couple of things to keep in mind here. One is that Ted Cruz has a much better favorability rating in this sample than he did in the October UT/Trib poll and much better re-elect numbers than in the April Texas Lyceum poll. That doesn’t mean this poll is wrong and those polls are right – the Lyceum poll was of adults, not registered voters, so it’s not even a true comparison – just that this poll is different than others we have seen. At this point, there are likely to be some big variations in polling results across samples just because assumptions about the makeup of the electorate are likely to diverge as well. Which again doesn’t mean this poll is wrong or that it’s based on optimistic assumptions for Ted Cruz – I don’t know what assumptions the pollster made about the electorate, I don’t have that data. It just means this is one poll result, and there will surely be others.