Republican Gov. Greg Abbott holds a 6 percentage point lead over Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke as the race to the Nov. 8 election grinds toward the finish line, a poll released Sunday by the University of Texas at Tyler shows.
The poll of 973 likely voters contacted randomly Oct. 17-24 shows Abbott ahead 50% to O’Rourke’s 44%. When the field is expanded to registered voters, 1,330 of whom were contacted, Abbott’s lead shrinks to just 3 points.
The results differ from a recent poll by the University of Texas Politics project that showed the incumbent with a strong 11-point edge, and with one conducted by Beacon Research that was commissioned by the Democratic Policy Institute that showed just a 3-point difference in Abbott’s favor. But UT-Tyler’s findings are in line with several non-aligned polls conducted in late summer. The margin of error for the “likely voters” breakout is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
Moving down the ballot, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was leading Democratic challenger Mike Collier 44%-35% among likely voters and Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton was ahead of Democrat Rochelle Garza 42%-38%. Like Abbott, Patrick and Paxton are seeking third terms.
The poll’s data is here. I appreciate the fact that they gave us both a likely voter and registered voter result – this pollster has done that in the past, but it wasn’t always presented in a way that made it clear. I also appreciate that this story mentioned other polls and where this one fit in rather than rely on the ridiculous language of this candidate or that losing or gaining ground when comparing one isolated poll result to another, different, poll result. Having context is always better than not having context.
These numbers look reasonable enough. Both Beto and Abbott get about the same amount of support from their own voters, with independents split evenly. Beto does well among Black (78-16) and Latino (59-36) voters while Abbott crushes with white voters (63-31). Of interest in the AG race, one possible reason for Rochelle Garza to be the top performer, is that she is at 47-33 among indies, a significant difference from the Governor’s race. That’s of a small sample of a single poll, so don’t put any actual weight on it, but I’ll file it away for later if it becomes relevant. Even with their LV sample, there were a lot of “don’t know” responses in the Lite Gov and AG races, so who knows what that means. I don’t know if we’re expecting any more poll data at this point – now that we have actual votes, polling becomes of less value – but for what it’s worth, this is where we are.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that in their September poll, which was of registered voters, Abbott was leading 47-38.
