Texas in play? Poll shows Donald Trump under 50%, Ted Cruz doing even worse

Democrats often claim to have the key to the Lone Star State, which has reliably voted Republican for decades.

A new poll suggests the party, or at least its standard bearers in presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Senate hopeful Colin Allred, may be able to make Texas competitive at the top of the ticket in November.

In the presidential derby, it’s notable that while Donald Trump leads the field by roughly 5 points, it’s not with a majority, as just 49.5% of the 1,365 likely voters polled in the University of Houston-Texas Southern University survey say they’ll vote for him.

That does put the former president ahead of Harris’ 44.6%, with other candidates marginalized, including apparently withdrawing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (2%) and fewer than 1% each for the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Libertarian Chase Oliver.

Undecided voters make up 2.7% of the sample.

The 4.9-point margin shouldn’t make Republicans breathe easily, especially since the previous administration of the poll showed a 9-point race between Trump and President Biden in Texas. As the old saying goes, objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they may appear.

One factor in Harris’ favor is that her voters say they are more committed than Trump’s, though it is close: 96% of those who say they’ll pick the Democrat describe themselves as certain of their vote choice, 4 points higher than Trump.

Kennedy, Stein and Oliver voters are much more ready to abandon their positions: 61% of RFK diehards don’t expect to change their votes, but that likely will change after Friday. Only 34% of Stein and Oliver voters are fully committed to their choices.

The polling otherwise presents a good-news-bad-news scenario for Trump.

Among the positives: a marginal lead over Harris with Hispanic voters, 47% to 46%. 

Trump also dominates Harris with male voters as is the case in most polls, with a 56% to 38% lead here (up 4 points from the previous poll with Biden as his opponent). This advantage is slightly offset by Harris’ 50% to 44% lead with women voters, with her up 8 from Biden’s level with the same cohort.

In another favorable sign, Trump more than holds his own with independent voters here, leading Harris 41% to 39%. Both candidates exceed 90% support in their respective political parties, and as long as Trump wins the battle of the unaligned voters, he’s likely in good shape in November.

But younger voters who wavered from the Democratic column seem to be coming home. Harris leads Trump 55% to 38% with Gen Z voters, who were born in 1997 and after. Back in June, Trump actually led Biden 42% to 39% with the same cohort.

Harris also takes a majority of millennial voters, 51% to 43% for Trump.

Finally, the pollsters note, “Harris’s vote intention compared to Biden’s in June increased by 21 percentage points among Independents (18% to 39%), by seven percentage points among those who voted for Biden in 2020 (84% to 91%) and by 13 percentage points among those 2024 likely voters who did not cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election (38% to 51%).”

Yet even as Trump seems like he’s still weathering the storm in Texas, Ted Cruz supporters have more reasons for concern. Though Cruz leads with 46.6% compared with 44.5% for Democrat Colin Allred and 2.5% for Libertarian Ted Brown, with 6.4% undecided, trouble brews in the crosstabs.

One major issue for Cruz is that Democrats and Harris supporters are more committed to his opponent than Republicans and Trumpers are to him. Allred takes 93% inside his own party, with Cruz garnering 88% of GOP voters.

Only 88% of Trump supporters back Cruz, with 90% of Harris backers behind Allred. And 50% of Kennedy supporters and 60% of those backing Stein and Oliver say the same about the Democratic nominee.

The senator is barely above water in terms of overall favorability (49% to 48%), while former NFL player Allred enjoys a better split (48% to 37%).