At long last, some new polling data, and this one is eye-catching.
A year before they could meet in a showdown for the state’s top office, Gov. Greg Abbott and expected Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke are virtually tied, according to new polling from the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation (TxHPF).
The poll shows Republican Abbott leading O’Rourke, 44% to 43% among voters who went to the polls in 2020, with the rest of respondents unsure or supporting minor-party candidates. The race is virtually unchanged if actor Matthew McConaughey, whose name has come up in gubernatorial-race speculation, appears on the ballot as an Independent candidate.
Among all registered voters, Abbott is the choice of 43% and O’Rourke of 42%, with 12% unsure of whom they would vote for and 3% choosing minor party candidates. The results remain nearly identical if the population is restricted to 2020 presidential election voters, with Abbott preferred by 44% and O’Rourke by 43%, with 10% unsure and 3% supporting minor party candidates.
O’Rourke, a former Congressman from El Paso who previously ran for president and for a seat in the U.S. Senate, has not formally announced his candidacy for governor but is widely expected to run.
The poll found that 49% of Hispanic respondents favor O’Rourke and 31% favor Abbott. Hispanics who are evangelical Protestants are more likely to vote for Abbott (42%) than O’Rourke (37%), while Catholic Hispanics and non-religious Hispanics overwhelmingly favor O’Rourke (56% and 46%) over Abbott (29% and 28%).
Before taking on the Democratic nominee, Abbott must make it through a competitive Republican primary. The new polling shows the two-term governor with an overwhelming lead in the GOP race: Abbott is ahead of his next-closest rival, former state Republican Party Chairman Allen West, by 51 percentage points, with 64% of the most likely GOP primary voters intending to vote for Abbott compared to 13% for West.
“Governor Abbott has shored up his right flank and stands firmly on solid ground with Republican primary voters,” said Jason Villalba, Chairman and CEO of the TxHPF. “But based on our data, it appears that he has achieved this objective by cutting deeply into his support with Texans who vote in the general election. Much can happen over the course of the year, but these numbers show that not only can we expect a competitive general election, but that Abbott’s shift to the hard right may have imperiled his governorship.”
[…]
The TxHPF has previously established its credibility in measuring public opinion in Texas. In August 2020, the TxHPF was the first major research organization to forecast that then-President Donald Trump was running relatively well among Texas Hispanics. Those survey results proved to be strikingly accurate on Election Night 2020, when Trump performed stronger than previous Republican candidates in heavily Hispanic regions of the state.
For the survey 1,402 respondents were interviewed online between October 14 and 27, with a margin of error of +/- 2.6%.
The data they provide can be found here – it doesn’t provide the individual questions or the totals for each, so make of it what you will. The topline numbers are the Abbott/Beto number, which has Abbott up 44-43, and a three-way race that includes Matthew McConaughey as an independent, which goes 40/37/9, a much less sexy result that those idiot polls that had Abbott versus McConaughey straight up without ever acknowledging that the only way that could happen is if our boy ran in and won the Democratic primary first.
As far as I can tell, the last straight up horse-race poll result we have is from September, in which Abbott led 42-37. Both that one and the other most recent result, from July, which had Abbott leading Beto 45-33, are from the DMN/UT-Tyler series that included those dumb Abbott/McC matchups. Since then what we’ve had is multiple polls that have highlighted Abbott’s declining approval rating, but basically no other election polls. I have to assume that Beto will indeed make official his candidacy, at which point I suspect we’ll get all the polling we can handle.
The one thing this poll doesn’t have that I would have liked to have seen was an approval rating for President Biden, which has also tanked since late spring, matching the national trend. This poll does a very nice job of taking a closer look at Latino response to Abbott and Beto, and boy would it have been cool to see those same questions about Biden and maybe even that other guy, to perhaps provide some extra context about the last election and what we might see this time around. Alas.
They also polled the primaries, with Abbott well in the lead and Ken Paxton just above fifty percent, thanks mostly I’d say to none of the other candidates being remotely well known to the voters. Same for the Ag Commissioner race, and the Dem primaries for Lite Guv and Attorney General, which is now out of date anyway. Primary polling is a lot harder to do, and the fact that many candidates aren’t well known doesn’t help. I’d say Abbott is in good shape to win without a runoff, Paxton may be able to avoid a runoff, and the rest isn’t worth worrying about.
As always, this is one poll, so don’t put too much weight on it. I do think we’ll start to see more results, and once that happens I’ll add a new widget on the sidebar to track them all. That has sure come in handy for me when I’ve had to trawl through the archives here to provide comparisons to past numbers. Let’s get this thing on the road already. The Texas Signal and the Chron have more.
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