According to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, Trump is ahead of the Democratic front-runners: former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. He’s also beating two Texas natives, former U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke and former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro. O’Rourke dropped out of the race last week after the poll was conducted.
Trump was ahead of both Biden and Warren by 7 percentage points, as 49 percent of registered voters backed the president, compared with 36 percent of voters who would support either Democrat.
The closest head-to-head matchup in the state was between Trump and Sanders. The self-described Democratic socialist garnered support from 40 percent of voters polled, compared with Trump’s 45 percent.
O’Rourke had a better chance to take down Trump than some of the Democratic Party’s top candidates. The former congressman trailed the president by 5 percentage points. But O’Rourke dropped out of the race November 1, conceding that his campaign didn’t have “the means to move forward successfully.”
The poll represented a shift from earlier this year when a possible blue wave was predicted in the Lone Star State. Texas has voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1980.
A Quinnipiac University poll from June showed Trump to be in statistical ties with leading 2020 Democrats, including Biden, Warren and Sanders. Trump’s hold over the state, which he won by nearly 10 percentage points in 2016, was also shown to be threatened by Democrats Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris.
In response to the Quinnipiac survey, Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Manny Garcia said in a statement that “poll after poll shows the same result: Texas is the biggest battleground state and the focal point of the Democratic offensive strategy.”
Senator John Cornyn, a Texas native and one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, acknowledged the rising popularity of Democrats in the traditionally conservative state. He said earlier this year that “the tectonic plates shifted in Texas” during the 2018 election cycle and that “if Texas turns back to a Democratic state, which it used to be, then we’ll never elect another Republican [president] in my lifetime.”
The latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll surveyed 1,200 registered voters from October 18 to 27. The survey has an overall margin of error of about 3 percentage points.
