Morning Digest: New poll finds Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in a tight race, but caution is warranted
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The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar. Leading Off ●Morning Digest: New poll finds Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in a tight race, but caution is warranted
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar. Leading Off ● TX-Sen, TX-Gov: Quinnipiac made waves on Wednesday when they released a survey—the school’s first ever of Texas—giving GOP Sen. Ted Cruz just a 47-44 lead over Democratic nominee Beto O'Rourke. They also found GOP Gov. Greg Abbott with a 49-40 edge against former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez, while businessman Andrew White, the other candidate in the May 22 Democratic primary runoff, trails 48-41. So, what to make of one of the best poll results for Texas Democrats in ages? Campaign Action Well, as we've been writing for years, if a poll feels too good to be true, it probably is, just as the inverse is often the case. Perhaps the biggest red flag is that Donald Trump posts a 43-52 disapproval rating, which is almost identical to the 41-52 score Quinnipiac found him at nationally earlier this month; the HuffPost Pollster average also gives Trump a similar 42-53 nationwide score. Trump carried Texas by a 52-43 margin in 2016, so it seems very unlikely that Texas voters now disapprove of him just about as much as the entire country does. But we can't just compare Quinnipiac's horserace numbers to the average, because other public polling has been scant in the Senate race and nonexistent in the gubernatorial contest. All we have are a December WPA Intelligence poll for Cruz that had him ahead 52-34 and a January PPP survey for the progressive group End Citizens United, which has endorsed O’Rourke, that also found Cruz in front, albeit by a smaller 45-37 spread. At this point, we should be skeptical of the notion that Cruz is on the brink of defeat, or that Abbott is in real danger. If nothing else, we always caution that you should never let one poll determine your view of a race, even if—in fact, especially if—there’s just one poll out there. That hardly means that we should throw a poll like this out, of course. Democrats are more energized than they’ve been in years, and if that enthusiasm continues, it’ll go a long way towards producing a favorable midterm electorate. O'Rourke also has done a strong job of rallying anti-Cruz donors nationwide, so much so that his eye-popping first-quarter haul of $6.7 million was more than double Cruz’s $3.2 million take. Of course, Cruz will still have plenty of resources to defend himself with, and his well-funded conservative allies will have his back, but O'Rourke will be able to get his message out in a way Democratic Senate candidates in Texas haven't been able to in a very long time. So even if Quinnipiac’s numbers are on the rosy side, Cruz still faces a serious challenge—as Daily Kos Elections’ David Beard argued he could from the moment O’Rourke launched his campaign a year ago. Read more