The state’s weirdest pollster does it again.
Freshly announced gubernatorial hopeful Beto O’Rourke is running six percentage points behind Gov. Greg Abbott in a direct matchup, and Abbott leads both the Democrat O’Rourke and Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey in a three-way race for Texas governor, according to a Dallas Morning News-University of Texas at Tyler poll released Sunday.
In a race between Abbott and O’Rourke, the two-term GOP incumbent leads among all registered voters, 45%-39%. A substantial 22% want someone else to be governor, the poll found.
By nearly 2-to-1, all voters would be more likely to support McConaughey than O’Rourke. Pluralities of Democrats and independents want the Oscar-winning movie star and products endorser to run.
Still, McConaughey continues to lack a clear lane into next November’s general election. By 65%-11%, Democratic voters believe O’Rourke is the best opportunity for Democrats to break a statewide losing streak that dates to 1998.
In the hypothetical three-way general election contest, Abbott is the choice of 37%; McConaughey 27%; and O’Rourke 26%. 10% of voters want someone else. The poll, conducted Nov. 9-16, surveyed 1,106 adults who are registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
With the race taking shape, McConaughey has just more than three weeks left in the candidate-filing period to jump in, noted UT-Tyler political scientist Mark Owens, the poll’s director.
“It appears that if Matthew McConaughey chooses to enter the race before Dec. 13, he will be more on par with Beto O’Rourke than Governor Abbott,” Owens said.
“Even if McConaughey delays a start in public service, both Abbott and O’Rourke have become the face of the two political parties in Texas.”
You can see the poll results here. I’m not going to spend too much time on it. We have the Hispanic Policy Foundation poll, which had a completely different result for the three-way race, and the UT/Trib poll, which didn’t ask a three-way question but which found less enthusiasm overall for McConaughey. That “22% want someone else” number from this poll, by the way, actually comes from the Abbott-McConaughey question, which as we have discussed ad nauseum is meaningless since there’s no way that can happen.
Anyway. This result is in between the two previous ones, which suggests that the spread is a reasonable one. We’ll see what we get with future polls, of which I think we’ll have plenty. Guess I need to add a widget to the sidebar to track them.