TX-SEN JMC: Cruz +7

[NOVA Green]

There are a ton of things I love about Texas, having lived there for about five years until just recently....

One of the things that I don't love about Texas (Sorry Gary Nunn Country/Folk Native Texas Son song Rip-off quote--- love the artist myself) is how difficult it is to poll for General Elections....

Not only do you have over six major media markets that encompass some 80% of the population of Texas, but additionally you have tons of extremely complicated variables when it comes to weighing and modelling electoral turnout by region, race/ethnicity, demographic, "party affiliation", etc....

Additionally we have this additional variable when it comes to Midterm Election turnout among these various communities that represent the Great State of Texas.

Minority turnout in Texas in General tends to be significantly lower in off-year elections than Presidential Year Elections, especially among Latino Voters.

Compounding this problem is that working-class Latinos tend to vote overwhelmingly Democrat, but have much lower turnout levels than Middle-Class Latinos, whom tend to be much swingier in their voting preferences than working-class Latinos, although we started to recently change over the past few Federal General Election cycles....

I suspect that pollsters regardless of partisan lean are trying to use "typical off-year" GE modelling for the 2018 US SEN election to play it safe, and create a typical regional and social-demographic model, rather than jumping to conclusions about a hypothetical voting surge among various age and ethnic populations more likely to vote Democrat than a typical off-year election model.

If anything, this poll exposes the relative weakness of Cruz among a traditionally extremely favorable off-year electorate for a Republican Candidate in Texas....

We will have plenty more polls over the next few months on the state of the US-SEN TX race, but let's face it, Dems are going to be sinking some $$$ into Texas in the '18 GE, and this is a state with some pretty fast changing demographic, political, and cultural changes in the population centers where 80% of the population lives, even in an off-year election.