Another state poll result to add to the list.
A new Emerson College poll in Texas, which has long been a Republican stronghold, shows Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by only 6 points (42% to 36%), with 10% of respondents voting for Libertarian Gary Johnson, 6% for the Green Party’s Jill Stein and 6% undecided. Trump’s lead is within the poll’s 3.6% margin of error. The poll was completed before Clinton announced she had been diagnosed with pneumonia.
As a point of comparison, in the 2012 presidential race, Mitt Romney soundly defeated Barack Obama by 16 points in the Lone Star State (57% to 41%). Texas has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when Jimmy Carter beat GOP incumbent Gerald Ford.
Trump is having mixed success winning over voters who supported Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the state’s GOP primary last March. In the Emerson poll, 76% of Cruz voters plan to vote for Trump in November, while 10% support Johnson, 6% are unsure, and the remaining 7% are split between Stein and Clinton. Cruz won the Texas GOP primary, beating Trump 44% to 27%. Clinton is struggling to win over voters who supported Bernie Sanders in the Texas Democratic primary. Only 49% of Sanders supporters plan to vote for Clinton in November; 21% say they will vote for Stein.
Trump is winning the Independent vote 36% to 19% over Clinton, with Stein taking 16% and Johnson 15%. However, it appears Johnson is hurting Trump more than Clinton, taking 12% of registered Republican voters and 15% of Independents while only winning 3% of registered Democrats.
The text above is taken from the ECPS homepage, where you can also download an XLS with poll data. The top link is to a press release with more details than what I quoted above, but it was formatted in a funky way that made copying nearly impossible. The ECPS did poll Texas in 2014, though theirs was one of the least accurate results. It was in March, for what that’s worth, but they were way off. The Libertarian/Green numbers are quite a bit higher than they were in the PPP poll, but that’s the only point of comparison we have. The one thing we can say is that this is consistent with other results showing a less-than-usual-size lead for Trump. The Texas Lyceum has poll numbers coming out today, so we’ll see where they fit in. Link via The Hill.
PoliTex (FWST) has the Lyceum results this morning: Trump 39, Clinton 32, Johnson 9, Stein 3, don’t know/no opinion 17, MoE 4.37%