The University of Texas continued to go against the grain in the polling here when it found U.S. Senator Ted Cruz with a bigger lead in a fight with Democratic challenger Colin Allred than Donald Trump has over Kamala Harris in a survey that it conducted this month.
The Texas Politics Project poll showed Trump holding steady in the Lone Star State with the same 5-point advantage he had in August. The presidential contenders for the two major parties both picked up 2 points in the UT poll that was taken over the course of eight days that ended October 10 compared to the support they enjoyed here in the school's last survey two months ago.
But the Texas flagship university's found Allred in a deeper hole than the vice-president a month before the fall vote - with Cruz up by 7 points on the congressional Democrat from Dallas after leading here by 8 points in August. Cruz scored support from 51 percent of the likely Texas voters in the October poll compared to 44 percent for Allred.
Latino voters, who account for 22 percent of the UT polling sample this month, appear to be the most likely to switch allegiances in the upcoming election when sized up against the U.S. Senate election that featured Cruz and O'Rourke six years ago.
Cruz led Allred by 2 points among Hispanic voters with 49 percent support from that pivotal voting bloc in the October survey at UT.
Latinos favored O'Rourke by a two-to-one margin in the UT poll before the 2018 vote with 60 percent support.
The new UT survey was taken before the first and only U.S. Senate debate on Tuesday night. Allred could get a slight bump from her performance at an event that both sides claimed to win.
Trump has wavered little in the polling in the nation's second largest state in the past month with leads over Harris that ranged from a low of 5 points to 7 points at the top end. But the Cruz lead in the new UT poll is almost twice as large as the average of eight previous surveys in the Lone Star State in the past month. The incumbent had an average lead of 3.6 points during that span of time before the University of Texas survey for October pushed it up to 4.1 points. Trump led Harris by 6.1 points here on average in the past month.
Allred and the Democrats may find some consolation in the fact that Cruz led Democrat Beto O'Rourke by 6 points with 51 percent support in October before the general election in 2018. Cruz beat O'Rourke by less than 3 points that year.
Harris and Allred were up on their GOP foes by 9 points and 12 points respectively among independent voters in Texas in the school's latest poll. Harris and Allred led by 24 points and 18 points respectively among moderates. But Trump and Cruz had leads of 20 points and 24 points respectively among white voters here in the October poll at UT.
Harris had a 20 point lead among Texans under 30 while Allred was up by only 7 points among the same younger voters. But Trump and Cruz led their Democratic rivals by 16 points and 17 points respectively among men here. Harris had an advantage of only 6 points among women voters in Texas while Allred led by only 2 points among female voters who accounted for 54 percent of the UT sample.
more to come ...
