Rep. James Talarico
A new poll from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project shows 42% of registered voters surveyed would vote for Democratic state Rep. James Talarico if the election for the U.S. Senate were held today. That compares to 39% who would support Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“James Talarico has a lead which is pretty historic, particularly in the context of other polling that we’ve seen throughout the summer, several of which have also found Talarico ahead by a similar margin — some a little bigger, some a little smaller,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
Critically, the poll showed 14% of respondents had yet to make up their mind between Paxton, Talarico, Libertarian candidate Ted Brown, or any of the other candidates on the ballot.
“There are a lot of people that have still not really checked into this race,” Henson said, “and part of the conventional wisdom is that … voters start paying more attention after Labor Day, particularly less-engaged voters. So, we’ll be watching pretty closely to see where those undecided voters start lining up as the fall gets here.”
The margin of error in the poll was 2.83%.
“With that margin of error, we can we can suspect that this is a very close race,” Henson said. “But since four of the last five public nonpartisan polls have had Talarico ahead by varying margins, I think it’s fair to consider Talarico probably doing a better job at this point of consolidating his vote than Ken Paxton has done so far.”
The poll found Republicans with modest leads over Democratic candidates in the races for governor.
- Incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott was leading state Rep. Gina Hinojosa 45% to 40%.
- Incumbent Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was ahead of state Rep. Vikki Goodwin by a wider margin at 42% to 35%.
- In the race for attorney general, Sen. Mayes Middleton was leading Sen. Nathan Johnson 40% to 35%.
- Acting Comptroller Don Huffines had the widest lead against state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt polling at 40% to 34%.
Republicans were also leading in generic ballots for U.S. Congress and the Texas Legislature, according to the poll.
Poll data is here. The last poll before this one was the Emerson College one that had Paxton up by one point, the first poll in awhile that had him in the lead. The June UT/Texas Politics Project poll also had Paxton up by a point, while the May poll has Talarico up by seven.
The UT/Texas Politics Project poll has a higher share of “don’t know/no answer” responses than others do, for whatever the reason. The most interesting other results in this month’s data are two issue questions. One is “the decline of the salience of immigration and border security among all partisan groups in Texas, most consequently among Republicans”, in which the percentage of people who say immigration or border control is Texas’ most important issue is down in the low 20s, instead of around 60%. This is by far the lowest total since they started tracking it in 2015, outside of two data points at the start of the pandemic. The other is the percentage of people saying that the economy is the biggest issue, up around 30% instead of the usual level of ten percent or less, the highest it’s been since 2011-2013. You can make of that what you will, I’ll just note that big swings in public opinion often work against the party in power. We’ll see what the next poll results look like.