It’s that time of year, when various polls show Texas statewide races closer than they actually are.
This time around: The Ted Cruz/Beto O’Rourke Senate Race.
Like Wendy Davis was in 2014, O’Rourke is the Texas poster-child for national Democrats. O’Rourke gets fawning profiles in places like Town and Country, which declares “Kennedyesque” (presumably with less adultery and vehicular homicide), and GQ, where former Texas Observer and Austin Chronicle writer Christopher Hooks calls the man born Robert Francis O’Rourke “authentic” and “without guile.”
A few weeks ago, a new Lyceum Poll showed O’Rourke within two points of Cruz. The first thing to check with a Lyceum Poll is how badly they skewed the sample. That didn’t take long: They sampled equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, because evidently their samples are from 1994, the last time a top-of-the-ticket Democrat was within 10% of the vote total of the Republican.
Now this week we have a Marist poll that shows O’Rourke within four points of Cruz. I’d like to tell you what level of skewing went into the Marist poll crosstabs, only I can’t find any. If that’s the complete list of questions, they don’t appear to have asked party affiliation, so there’s no way to know just how skewed the smallish (759) sample of registered voters is.
In 2012, Ted Cruz beat Paul Sadler by 16 points. In 2014, Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by 20 points. Will O’Rourke put in better showings than either of those doomed Democrats? Actually yes, I think he will. He’s a much better campaigner than either, and he’s raised much more money than Sadler’s doomed “let’s lose with an old warhorse rather than an unknown” campaign.
But keep in mind that Cruz racked up that 16 point win against Sadler in a Presidential election year against serious Obama headwinds, and Sadler wasn’t out on the stumps flacking for gun control. This year, the economy is booming and the electorate is probably going to look closer to 2014. But pretending O’Rourke has a serious chance to win Texas is sucking national donations from a dozen endangered-but-less-sexy Democratic senate incumbents in red states.
Edit to add: As commenter richb58 notes down below, the crosstabs for that Marist poll are now out and, yeah, they’re garbage. Their sample is 33% Republican and 31% Democrats, a two point difference in party ID compared to the 9 point difference exit polls found in 2016, mirrored in the 9 point vicory Donald Trump enjoyed over Hillary Clinton that year.
Tags: 2018 Election, 2018 Texas Senate Race, Beto O'Rourke, Democrats, Elections, Lyceum Poll, Marist Poll, polls, Republicans, Ted Cruz, Texas
Personally, I don’t mind if the Democrats spend their money in the wrong place… I think it is the best thing they could do with it for the country!
I found the methodology/sampling for the NBC/Marist poll, and it’s a crock of sh*t.
http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/NBC-News_Marist-Poll_Texas-Nature-of-the-Sample-and-Tables_August-2018_1808201203.pdf#page=1