Texas Continues to Lean Red as Trump, Cruz Maintain Narrow Leads
by J. Andrew Sinclair, Ph.D. & Kenneth P. Miller, J.D., Ph.D.
Trump ahead of Harris in Texas, although the race is competitive
In our poll of registered Texas voters, Trump leads Harris 49%-44% with a margin of error of 3.49. About 7% of respondents remain undecided or prefer a third-party candidate. The poll was designed by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) and implemented by YouGov. It includes 1,108 voters in Texas as part of a larger national poll.
When Texas’s undecided or third-party voters are asked whether they lean toward either major candidate, Trump maintains his advantage, 50%-45%. Restricting the sample to likely voters and reweighting puts Trump’s advantage at 51%-46% (N=1,075; MoE=3.53). These results are consistent with other publicly available, large-sample survey results from early- to mid-October.
Our data shows that in Texas Harris is the preferred candidate of younger (18-29) registered voters by 53%-40%; Black voters by 76%-17%; and women by 48%-44%. While Harris leads among these groups in Texas, her margins are not as large as in more competitive states. Most notably, among Texas’s Hispanic/Latino registered voters, Harris’s advantage is negligible (47% for Harris, 45% for Trump).
Cruz narrowly leads Allred for U.S. Senate
We find nearly identical partisan results in Texas’s U.S. presidential election and its U.S. Senate election, despite recent media reports suggesting a tightening race between incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Democratic challenger Colin Allred. Our poll shows Cruz holds a 49%-45% lead, with a margin of error of 3.49. The vast majority of respondents (89%) support either the Harris/Allred or Trump/Cruz pairing, with very few split-ticket voters.
Some have contended that Allred can win the race due to Senator Cruz’s alleged personal unlikeability. We asked respondents: “Regardless of whether or not you are going to vote for him, just evaluating him as a person: do you like or dislike Senator Ted Cruz?” Voters split on the question along partisan lines. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats dislike Ted Cruz, while only 8% like him. However, 72% of Republicans like Ted Cruz, while only 12% dislike him. These results help explain the strong correlation in our survey data between support for Cruz and for Trump.
Crosstabs of the Texas Senate poll highlight a dilemma for the state’s Democrats: perhaps demography is not destiny after all. Many Democrats have believed that Texas’s fast-changing demographics would cause the state to turn blue through an expanding coalition of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and younger voters. However, this long-expected outcome has not materialized. While Black voters solidly support Democrats such as Allred (75% for Allred – 15% for Cruz), the state’s Hispanic/Latino voters divide almost evenly between the two parties (49% for Allred, 45% for Cruz). More generally, in the Lone Star State, Democrats perform less well among demographic groups they win decisively elsewhere–thereby, for now, keeping Texas red.
The Survey
The data for this survey comes from the CMC-Rose Institute Fall 2024 Poll. The survey was designed by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College (CMC) and implemented online by YouGov between October 7, 2024 and October 17, 2024. The total sample of 1,108 registered voters was collected as part of a larger national survey, including respondents from the national sample and an additional 1,000 voters as a Texas oversample. The data is weighted by gender, age, race, education, past presidential vote, as well as party identification and ideology. YouGov created the “modeled frame” (the target YouGov uses to select respondents for inclusion and to create the survey weights) by using the American Community Survey (ACS) public use microdata file, public voter file records, the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration Supplements, the 2020 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, and the 2020 CES surveys, including demographics and the 2020 presidential vote. The survey has a margin of error of 3.49 for registered voters. To create a likely voter weight, respondents were screened for vote intention, and the data reweighted; the likely voter sample has a margin of error of 3.53.
The CMC-Rose Institute 2024 Poll is funded by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, Claremont McKenna College Faculty Major Grant Award, and Betsy Sinclair, Washington University in St. Louis.