Whenever there is a new poll of Texas released, there are a ton of hot takes on Twitter. Old believers of Texas as the great blue whale for the Democrats move to dismiss the poll, saying that Texas has looked good for Democrats in the past, but that they just can’t seem to pull it off. There are others who say that the numbers are real, and are a result of inevitable demographic shifts. Others dismiss Texas numbers as not mattering, because if Texas is close, surely the election is already won for the Democrats.
So let’s look at all of these arguments, why they are right/wrong, what the actual contents of the poll (including the crosstabs, which get very little attention) are saying, and how you can extrapolate that into the broader electorate.
The first argument of new Texas polls, is that polls showing a small Biden lead now is wrong, and Trump will flip it back when he gains in the polls/ when likely voter screens are more prevalent. I’ve written about Likely Voter screens before, and why they may not hurt the Democrats as they have in past years, so I won’t write about that now, so instead I’ll talk about the first argument, that a small lead will not hold. Firstly, polls have underestimated the Democrats in Texas in 2016 and 2018, particularly in the 2018 Senate race, where Republican Senator Ted Cruz was expected to win by high single digits, only to cling to a ~2% win. Additionally, if you only believed the polls, there would be no Democratic representatives in TX-07 and TX-32, as both were polled by the NYT/Sienna, showing small GOP leads, along with a large lead for Will Hurd in the TX-23. Both the TX-07 and TX-32 were won by over 5 points, and the TX-23 turned into a nail biting finish on election night, which has (probably, at least in part) lead to the retirement of Will Hurd in 2020. Other people dismiss those numbers because they expect Trump to claw back some of his losses close to November. The problem with this assumption is that it is the same working assumption that analysts have had since Joe Biden won the nomination, and at every point it has yet to materialize. Since Biden locked up the nomination the pandemic has only gotten worse, and Trump has done nothing but lose ground almost every month. While there is likely a floor for the GOP in modern American politics, and while we are *probably* approaching that, there is no reason to think that floor doesn’t include a loss in Texas.
Other people will argue that the result in Texas doesn’t matter, as it is not a swing state. This argument is mostly correct, as even if Joe Biden were to win Texas in November it would not yet be a swing state, as it would still vote to the right of the nation even in a Biden win, and would surely not be the reason Biden would win the election. However, Biden winning Texas would be an important step for Texas’s inevitable journey on its way to swing state status. Given the swings in 2016, 2018, and very likely 2020, it is only a matter of time until Texas (along with Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina) are given the same important status as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. While that will certainly not happen in 2020, depending on how well Biden is able to do in Texas, that could happen as early as 2024, or even 2028.
[...]
https://decisiondeskhq.com/texas-presidential-polling-the-devil-is-in-the-crosstabs/
