Could Texas really be in play?
Probably not, despite internet poll that shows race in dead heat
WASHINGTON — Ever since Democrats faded from prominence in Texas politics more than two decades ago, party activists have been awaiting a demographic tsunami of young people and Hispanics to bring them back.
Enter Donald Trump, a brash Republican presidential candidate who has offended Mexicans with nativist rhetoric and veered to the right on social issues that alienate many young, college-educated voters.
One upshot: a new internet poll of 5,000 Texas voters showing a dead heat between Trump and Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton, with Clinton at 46 percent and Trump at 45 percent. Suddenly, one poll seemed to thrust the Lone Star State onto the list of potential tossup states.
Is Texas really in play? Probably not, say operatives in both camps, though the Democrats tend to put a little more stock in the
new poll than Republicans.
The new Washington Post Survey Monkey poll mirrors many recent polls that give Clinton a slight edge nationally, though a new CNN poll released Tuesday showed her lead to have essentially evaporated. Until now, nobody had put Clinton with even a nominal lead in Texas.
Matt Angle, executive director of the Lone Star Project, an organization dedicated to making Democrats competitive again in Texas politics, noted that the SurveyMonkey poll’s web-based methodology has yet to be proven. He remains hopeful, but unconvinced, of a Clinton tie with Trump.
“I haven’t seen anything else to make me think that,” Angle said. “But I do think the atmosphere (for Democrats) is good. It’s better than I’ve seen it in recent elections.”
Chris Perkins, a GOP pollster and political consultant in Austin, said he, too, was skeptical. “Internet polling has been proven over and over to be wildly inaccurate. Can some of them be correct? Yes. But then there’s the old saying, ‘even a broken clock can be right twice a day.’ ”
Recent internal polls by both Democratic and Republicanleaning pollsters have tended to give Trump a strong lead in Texas, though the margins have fluctuated significantly in what many analysts rate as an unconventional election year.
Unlike traditional telephone surveys that rely on calls to random cellular and landline numbers, internet polls like SurveyMonkey’s recruit respondents from large pools of people who voluntarily sign up for online polling. Participants then are sifted to match the overall population of registered voters in each state.
Until recently, media organizations have tended to discount online surveys. Though researchers can weight their samples based on advanced probability theory, the results are not truly random. For the Washington Post, the partnership with SurveyMonkey was a first.
Some researchers say the nonprobability of internet polls is balanced by the ability to reach many more people more reliably than traditional telephone surveys, which increasingly are hampered by the prevalence of cell phones.
Pieces of the puzzle
The Post’s new poll was based on responses from 74,000 registered voters between Aug. 9 and Sept. 1, with state sample sizes ranging from about 550 to 5,000 — the number of voters reached in Texas.
The length of time covered by the poll also has raised questions, since it does not reflect potential changes in respondents’ attitudes over a three-week period while the campaigns ebbed and flowed.
“I’m surprised they would put that much stock in an online survey, based on the fact that internet surveys have a tendency to be inaccurate and that it took nearly a month to complete,” Perkins said.
Some academics say that as the science of polling evolves, however, each new poll has to be seen as a piece of a puzzle.
Rice University political scientist Robert Stein, a polling expert, said that well-designed internet polls can be as reliable if not more than traditional telephone polls. “You have to treat this is one more data point, and it’s a big data point,” he said. “I wouldn’t disregard it.”
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, said he has used both types of polling, and found the Post’s results to be generally in line with the national trends — except in Texas.
“The most controversial result is the Texas result,” he said. “It’s an outlier.”
Henson noted, however, that a number of recent private polls he has seen have given Trump only single-digit leads in Texas. Four years ago, President Barack Obama lost the state by 16 points to Mitt Romney; four years before that, he lost to John McCain by 10 points.
“When you haven’t seen a double-digit poll in this matchup in a long time, it’s hard not to get some sense that there is some kind of movement, and consider what the narrative of that movement is,” he said.
Neither invested much here
Craig Goodman, who teaches political science at the University of Houston in Victoria, said that although the Washington Post-SurveyMonkey poll has to be “taken with a grain of salt,” it fits into the broader context of a tightening race.
“Certainly, Donald Trump hasn’t been running away with Texas,” he said. “It certainly fits in with the broader narrative of where Trump has been struggling.”
Most political forecasts have been calling for a close election in 2016, though not in Texas. “The true measure of the accuracy of the (Post) poll will be whether or not the Clinton campaign decides to actually drop some resources into the state of Texas,” he said.
Neither camp has invested much money and organization in Texas, a deep red state that last went Democratic in 1976 — for Jimmy Carter.
Democrats say the new polling could be a sign of an early wave of demographic changes to come.
“What it shows is the potential,” Angle said.
“If minority turnout in Texas reaches reasonable levels, not outrageous levels, just reasonable levels, and then you get a Democratic candidate who can get one out of three of the remaining votes, then it becomes a dead heat.”
The new poll findings are fueling speculation about how fast that change could happen. Stein suggests that Trump may have brought a new dynamic to a Lone Star State in demographic flux, even if he is still likely to carry the state on Nov. 8.
“It’s a combination of the aging of an otherwise inactive electorate — Hispanics who are getting into their 40s now — as well as ticket-splitting by Republicans who can’t vote for Trump,” Stein said.
Trump faces another challenge in Texas: die-hard Republican supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz who remain skeptical of the Manhattan real estate magnate’s true conservatism.
“If that argument is going to take hold someplace, and it’s to be reflected in the polls, Texas is a likely place for that,” Henson said.
Despite an unpredictable election year, Republicans are not ready to cede Texas to Clinton.
“Moving forward, it would not shock me to see Trump underperform McCain,” Perkins said. “It could go either way. He could shoot up into the Romney area, or he could drop. This all depends on each campaign’s messaging, since we’ve seen some dramatic swings based on messaging for the past year.”