This is genuinely astonishing.
Julie Oliver
To showcase just how extensively Trump’s decline has shifted the playing field, the DCCC shared with the Washington Post details of an in-house poll it conducted of Texas’ deep-red 25th Congressional District that finds Joe Biden edging Donald Trump 47-46 and puts Republican Rep. Roger Williams up just 45-43 on his Democratic challenger, attorney Julie Oliver.
That’s a huge shift from 2016, when Williams’ district went for Trump by a wide 55-40 margin. And that’s exactly what Republicans intended: The 25th is part of a careful gerrymander that cracked the Austin area six ways and allowed the GOP to win five of those seats. One of those is Williams’ district, which stretches far to the north toward Dallas-Forth Worth, combining a slice of the state capital with rural regions well outside of it.
As a result, the 25th is more rural (and whiter) than most of the suburban seats in Texas that are at the top of Democrats’ target list. As DCCC executive director Lucinda Guinn put it, the district had only been “maybe on the outer edges of our battlefield,” but that may now change. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz only carried this seat 52-47 over Beto O’Rourke, so it’s plausible that the leftward march here is continuing.
Here’s the WaPo story that originated this, which goes a lot broader but doesn’t add anything to the CD25 story. What’s most remarkable about this is that of the nine Congressional districts that Dems have some hope to be competitive in, this one is probably last in line. It’s the only one not projected to be won by Biden in the event of a Biden win in Texas. In terms of 2018 performance, CD25 was one of the two weakest for Dems overall, closely aligned with CD03 but without the rapid growth and suburban characteristic of that district. It’s been generally seen as a “likely GOP” seat, with only Rachel Bitecofer being more bullish than that.
So yeah, if Biden is truly leading in CD25, then 1) he’s also truly leading statewide, by more than just a hair, and 2) by enough that he’s also leading in eight other Republican-held Congressional districts. He’s probably leading by enough that the entire statewide Democratic slate is in position to win in November. He’s probably leading by enough that it’s not a question of whether the Dems would take the State House, but by how much. Like I said, astonishing.
Now again we have to trot out the caveats: It’s one poll, it was commissioned by the DCCC, which doesn’t make it suspect in and of itself but does mean that they could have put the result in a desk drawer if they hadn’t found it useful, and Congressional polling is always more variable than statewide polling. That said, it’s not really out of line when districts like CD03 are also polling as even for Biden. At this point, you can only wish there were more competitive districts available.
As noted by the dKos post, Julie Oliver’s main flaw is that she has little cash on hand, despite raising $681K so far, a greater sum than she raised in the entire last cycle. I don’t know what she’s been spending her cash on, but she’s going to need to make it stretch a bit more. Or maybe the DCCC will decide to come in and play, which at this point seems hard to argue against. If this is where the numbers are, maybe we should believe them.
Huh… maybe it’s time to poll CD 17, SD 11, and SD 12? If this is the state of Texas, then Democrats will also take the SBOE too.
Leaking an internal poll that shows you are behind doesn’t make this seat look competitive. This is a stretch.