Republicans are feeling a little touchy about them.
“I think the emerging picture is one that looks a little bit tighter in the presidential election than we’ve seen in recent elections in the state,” said Joshua Blank, whose Texas Lyceum poll, released Thursday, found GOP nominee Donald Trump leading Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by only 7 percentage points among likely voters. “The Lyceum poll is another data point in a trend for a race that increasingly looks in the single digits at this time.”
That means Trump is behind where a generic Republican would be at this juncture in a general election in Texas — 10 to 12 points ahead of his Democratic opponent, added Blank, the manager of polling and research at the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
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The Lyceum Poll was the third survey in recent weeks to find a single-digit race in Texas, which the past two GOP nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, won by 16 and 12 points, respectively. According to a polling average compiled by the website RealClear Politics, Trump is now ahead of Clinton by 7.2 points in Texas.
Democrats are expressing cautious optimism about the state of the race in Texas, saying the polling, at the least, bodes well for down-ballot candidates and the post-2016 future of the beleaguered state party. Few are openly talking about winning the state this time around, though they cannot help but wonder what the margin will look like on Election Day if it is so irregularly narrow two months out.
“Three polls in a row can’t be wrong, right?” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa told the Texas Tribune on Saturday as he left the opening of a Clinton campaign office in Houston. It was there that U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Houston declared, “We are going to win Texas,” on the heels of a Washington Post/SurveyMonkey poll that showed the race tied in the Lone Star State.
Such declarations draw long eye rolls from Texas Republicans, who frequently refer to Democrats’ largely failed efforts to move the state in their direction during the 2014 elections. While some concede Trump may not carry the state as much as, say, Romney did, GOP operatives are skeptical of the methodologies used for recent public polls and suggest private surveys have found Trump leading by double digits, a more normal result.
“The theory that Texas is in play from the presidential standpoint — currently, as of right now — is just not the case,” said Chris Perkins, a top Texas pollster.
If the Trump campaign is worried about the numbers, it is not entirely showing it. While the nominee has taken the unusual step of tacking public appearances on to his fundraising swings through Texas, his advisers and allies have not given the impression it is meant to do anything more than soak up the free media attention that greets him wherever he goes.
“The margin in Texas from the public polls may be different from what we saw a few years ago, but it’s not enough to warrant a change in going after the true battleground states,” said Mike Baselice, a seasoned Austin-based pollster working for the Trump campaign. “The short of it is … anybody that’s looking at these polls may see some difference with what few polls existed in 2012, but the difference s irrelevant because this is going to go Republican.”
The list of GOP objections to recent public surveys is long and varied. The polls have been criticized for being conducted online, leaving out cell phone interviews, over- or under-sampling certain groups, ignoring the fact Texas does not have party registration and generally producing results out of sync with national trends.
Some pollsters, their critics say, just have a bad record in Texas. Emerson College, for example, released a poll shortly before the Texas Republican presidential primary that showed Cruz up by only 3 points. He went on to win the contest by nearly six times that.
Such a litany. As someone who has done his own fair share of whining about polls in the past, let me just say that while any one poll can be wrong, if a bunch of them are saying the same thing, you’re the one that’s probably wrong if you’re whining about them. Sure, the Washington Post result is an oddball done in a weird way, and a couple of the other pollsters don’t have much of a track record in Texas, but polls by the Trib/Texas Policy Project (which gave Mitt Romney a 55-39 edge in late October of 2012) and the Lyceum (which had Romney up 58-39 in early October of 2012) are also showing a single-digit Trump lead. At some point, the numbers speak for themselves.
Does that mean Texas is a swing state? Not by any reasonable measure – even if we accept that the real, true lead for Donald Trump in Texas is seven points, that’s a pretty comfortable lead by any objective standard. It’s just that it’s less than what we’re used to seeing. It is a big deal – Romney won the state by 16 points in 2012, remember – and it is kind of hilarious seeing the way it’s being downplayed. I think Republicans are a little nervous about the numbers; the fact that Greg Abbott is now all in for Trump and Ted Cruz is publicly worrying about holding the Senate are tells. They’re concerned about turnout in a way that you don’t usually see Texas Republicans be concerned about turnout.
Of course, we don’t know who these unnamed “critics” of the recent polls are, so it’s hard to say how ridiculous they’re being. The people who are quoted are the two GOP pollsters, both of whom seem to take the numbers at face value and make the far more valid point that Texas is still strongly favored to be carried by the Republican candidate this fall, if perhaps at a lesser margin. Those same two pollsters did their own surveys of Texas in 2012 and could certainly provide their own data for this year if they wanted to. The fact that they haven’t is also suggestive.
Maybe things will change in October. I won’t be shocked if polls begin to show Trump moving into double-digit lead territory. There are a lot of undecided/no answer respondents, and it seems likely a decent share of them normally vote Republican. Gary Johnson is also likely pulling some votes from Trump, which may wane as Election Day draws nearer. Against that is a slew of ancillary and anecdotal evidence suggesting that a larger number of non-traditional voters plan to come out this fall to vote against Trump. People are becoming citizens at a record rate. Voter registration is up. Polls of Latino voters show they are more engaged and say they are more likely to vote than in years past. Maybe that all doesn’t add up to much, but to the extent that it does, it probably isn’t being reflected in the polls. Good luck with picking a turnout model this year.