It may seem counterintuitive, but I believe that the Republicans’ big upset victory yesterday in a special election to fill a seat in the Texas Senate is bad news for Ted Cruz. The Democrats lost the supposedly safe San Antonio seat in no small part because the incumbent had to resign in June “after being found guilty of 11 felonies, including fraud and money laundering, related to his involvement with FourWinds Logistics, a now-defunct oilfield services company found to have perpetrated a Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors.”
It didn’t help that the Democrats ran Pete Gallego, a former U.S. congressman who had been ousted from office and then failed in a bid to retake his seat in 2016. Gallego ran with the uninspiring “long-running message that he would be a safe, reliable choice for the district in the wake of the tumultuous period that precipitated [his predecessor’s] resignation.” Governor Greg Abbott “held up [former Texas game warden Pete] Flores’ win as evidence that the idea of a ‘blue wave’ in November is overblown and that Hispanic voters have soured on Democrats.”
Evidently, the Latino voters of this particular senate district were fed up enough with the Democrats for giving them corrupt and ineffectual candidates that they were willing to give a Republican a chance to represent them. If a party doesn’t want that to happen, it needs to avoid Ponzi schemes, felony convictions, and appallingly boring messaging.
The problem for Ted Cruz is that he’s relying on Texans to stick with their historic partisan lean, but maybe Texans are ready to roll the dice on inspiring alternatives this year. The polling of the Cruz-O’Rourke race is certainly confusing. Yesterday, we saw a Quinnipiac poll showing Ted Cruz with a relatively comfortable 54-45 lead. The news came with some advice that Democrats temper their optimism about winning the race.
“The Texas U.S. Senate race between Sen. Ted Cruz and Congressman Beto O’Rourke, and Democratic hopes for an upset win there, have boosted talk of a Senate takeover,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. “These numbers may calm that talk. Congressman O’Rourke may be drawing big crowds and media attention, but Texas likely voters like Sen. Cruz better.”
Yet, today, we have the first poll to show Beto O’Rourke in the lead.
U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-El Paso, leads Republican incumbent Ted Cruz by 2 percentage points among likely voters, according to an Ipsos online poll released Wednesday in conjunction with Reuters and the University of Virginia. O’Rourke has been closing the gap over the last several months, but this is the first poll that puts him ahead of Cruz.
Forty-seven percent of likely voters told Reuters they would vote for O’Rourke, while 45 percent said they would cast their ballot for Cruz. Three percent said they would vote for “Other,” and 5 percent said “None.” The margin or error on that portion of the poll was 3.5 percentage points.
The difference in the results may be explained by the differing methodologies of the two pollsters. The Ipsos poll is an internet survey while the Quinnipiac relies on phone calls. The Ipsos poll also puts a lot of emphasis on the “temperature” of the respondents:
But it’s trying to predict who will show up on Election Day that shifts the numbers, said Ipsos Vice President Chris Jackson.
Ipsos is trying to gauge political enthusiasm on each side, said Jackson. The poll asked respondents to estimate the likelihood that they’d vote in the midterm elections on a scale from one to 10. “More Democrats are registering at the highest part of the scale, at the 10, than the Republicans,” Jackson said. And that’s what’s interesting, he said, because Republicans usually have the momentum advantage in Texas.
“It demonstrates how Democrats are mobilized,” said Jackson. “This election is going to be really competitive and its going be very hard fought.”
O’Rourke is also in an unusually strong financial position, having out-raised the incumbent Ted Cruz, a former presidential candidate with an enormous contact list, by over ten million dollars.
But Rep. O’Rourke’s biggest advantage might be that he is not the incumbent in this contest.
Respondents [to the Ipsos survey] were also asked whether they perceived Cruz and O’Rourke as “traditional” politicians. Sixty-three percent of respondents saw Cruz as traditional, while only 28 percent perceived O’Rourke that way — something that may be to O’Rourke’s advantage in a political climate that leans away from establishment politics, Jackson said.
Last night we saw an establishment politician in Pete Gallego lose a special election in a bright blue senate district. That could mean that the Republicans aren’t in as much trouble in Texas as people suspect, but it could also mean that establishment politicians are in a lot more peril than is generally understood.
Cruz is in trouble, bigly.
NO ONE likes this guy including his daughter. He’s been elected because he’s got an R behind his name and you can’t get to the right of him to primary him out. I won’t go so far as to say he’s toast because it is Texas.
As far as the Gallego thing goes, the mainstream media (and nearly everyone else) considers the Latino community to be as tribal as the redneck community. Ain’t so. They are very sophisticated politically, and quite capable of sending a message … then reversing that message in the next election.
In the for what its worth category:
copied from a Beto email asking for money:
A brand-new poll released moments ago by Reuters and the UVA Center for Politics took a serious look at likely voters in Texas. Here’s what they found:
“Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas had a 2-percentage-point LEAD over Cruz among likely voters in the state”
Like I said, I have no idea if this is the real deal, but Beto spent a lot of time emphasizing the polls when he was down by 9,8,7 …
Has anyone seen any polls for NJ lately? Is that guy making any headway against Menendez?
I like the results reflected by this poll, but I do have difficulty squaring them with yesterday’s Q poll. My concern is that internet pollsters have not yet found a “secret sauce” that makes their numbers reliable.
Reliable as in foolproof? Yup they havent and never will, of course.
As with any information, its unreliable, all we can do is develop a feeling of how we properly weigh it.
With political polls the sample size is often small,more accurate means higher costs, and perverse motivations- “our weekly poll shows no change at all” isnt grabbing peoples attention, will keep them inaccurate.
A scientific way of aggregating individual polls, like Fivethirtyeight does should give a better idea of what the current mood is, with big error bars of course.
Reliable as in weeding out self-selection and demographics issues that potentially impact internet polls to a higher degree than phone polls. Instinctively, I take internet polls with a larger grain of salt than phone polls.
. . . with a larger grain of salt than phone polls.
link
“With political polls the sample size is often small,more accurate means higher costs, and perverse motivations- “our weekly poll shows no change at all” isnt grabbing peoples attention, will keep them inaccurate.”
You don’t need incentives. You pointed out the reason for variability — sample size. There’s also issues with sampling time windows and selection biases. These are all problems that are going to get dramatically worse with each passing year.
Anyone younger than forty is very unlikely to answer the phone from an unknown caller, never mind take 10+ uncompensated minutes to fill out a survey.
We will find out in November which can’t get here fast enough.
I hope you’re right.
I want to believe. Unfortunately, I don’t.
I didn’t know a state senate flipped in a deep blue district. That bums me. The Quinnipac poll bummed me; Nate Silver considers Quinnipiac one of the more reliable polls.
I don’t believe online polls. They’re junk polls.
But I sure am rooting for Beto, and there’s still time for Cruz to do something stupid. Fingers crossed.
. . . “Online polls”, i.e., the ones various websites put up that any visitor to the site can take (sometimes with no restriction on voting multiple times; or even if there is, it can sometimes be evaded simply by deleting cookies) are indeed, as you say, complete “junk”. The “self-selected” sample violates — bigly! — all tenets of scientific polling. Not just useless, but worse-than-useless because they deceive people into thinking they’re getting meaningful info from them when they’re not.
“Internet polls” (I’m virtually certain Ipsos fits this description) are a different beast altogether: an attempt to meet requirements and assumptions of scientific polling, just administered over the internet rather than by phone.
I’m no expert (beyond the basics of scientific sampling), and too lazy to research it beyond what I just wrote above (538 would probably be a good starting place if somebody wanted to; would be surprised if Nate hasn’t weighed in on the pros and cons of each at some point), but I think any clear advantage of phone over Internet sampling has probably been fading for a fairly long time now; might even have reversed by now, though I’m not claiming to know that. For a few obvious things: Internet penetration probably rivals/surpasses phone penetration these days (I’d bet it does surpass residential landline penetration). The increasing penetration of cell phones (and their substantial replacement of landlines) poses problems in achieving a random (or close enough) sample that near-ubiquitous landline penetration did not. Caller ID enables screening of calls that was only possible in more primitive form in the late stages pre-cellphone-dominance, and increasingly, people screen out calls from callers not in their contacts (I know I do!), including pollsters. And there’s at least some suggestion that people, especially rightwingnuts, I think, increasingly just lie to pollsters over the phone (maybe over Internet, too? dunno; but for some reason think tha’d be less prevalent), perhaps out of some sick desire to discredit polling altogether.
I am worried. Liberals have to be careful of the echo chamber effect.
We really are in the fight of our lives. Chances are we’ll take the House, but the fact remains: too many races are way too close for a midterm election with TRUMP in office. Trump!! The whole world knows he’s wildly unfit for office, yet he’s giving us a run for the money.
Trump has suffered ~3 point decline in approval rating the last month and he’s slipping a teeny bit every day. Still, it’s scary. Too many too close races with civilization at stake.
God, I hope Manafort has a bombshell. I’d happily give him total immunity for burning this administration to the ground.
The ONLY reason any races are “close” is that the GOP gerrymandered the hell out of every district. But, as Nate Silver explains often, this is a double edged sword. Republicans tried to draw the maps so that they could maximize the # of Republicans elected, NOT so that they could all have safe seats.
If they had been willing to draw a few more districts where Democrats would have an advantage, then more of their own districts would be safer even in a wave election.
But, they didn’t their maps are very broad, but about 1″ deep. If the election is really about +10 for Democrats that is going to sweep a LOT of Republican scumbags out of office.
The Senate is different of course. There it will take a tidal wave for Democrats to take control of the Senate, but even this is possible.
Wave elections tend to all break one way. Republicans won virtually all the close elections in 2010 and 2014. The wave broke close to the election and was decisive.
In this election most Republicans have been fed a diet of total lies from Fox News for so long they simply don’t believe in polls.
ALL polls are Fake News. The polls were wrong in 2016, and underestimated Trump, so all polls are wrong forever. Period.
They think they are about to win an historic victory because everybody loves Trump. It’s just the lying Fake News Media and the Deep State that are trying to undermine Trump. But, it won’t work because all the heroic Tea Partiers are still behind our great President!
They are as oblivious as a lot of Democrats in 2010. I remember one guy arguing that Democrats should be in position to pick up seats in the 2010 election. This was about 1 month before they lost, “bigly.”
“The whole world knows he’s wildly unfit for office”
I think we need to come to recognize that this is not true. A substantial portion of our world likes Trump. They like the horrible things that he is and does. That is who they are. They are our neighbors. Some of them — perhaps the less public of them — are our friends.
Setting aside that unsettling fact, the Republicans are defending a lot fewer contestable seats than the Democrats are. Winning the Senate is long odds just because of the math, but it is still more probable than I would have thought a few months ago.
you are right. I live in a red district and many of my “friends” just love him and when we are together they take great pleasure in telling me about it and why don’t they just lock her up and choice words for Obama. They are not just kidding either. I doubt there is not much Fat Donnie can do to change their minds. So with him saying nice things about Cruz and others it makes the job very hard. I am also despairing about stopping Kav short of a state investigation into rape, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.