A new poll out this week shows Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton neck and neck with her Republican opponent Donald Trump, but political experts don’t see the “red” in this Republican-dominant state fading any time soon.
The poll put together by the online pollster group Survey Monkey is different from other political polls released this year. Rather than randomly selecting its participants, Survey Monkey announces the poll online and uses the answers of people who CHOSE to participate. Their results of the presidential race between Clinton and Trump show the candidates in a dead heat when it comes to the Texas electorate.
Mark Jones, a professor of political science with the Baker Institute of Public Policy at Rice University in Houston says voters should take the latest poll concerning the presidential race with a healthy dose of skepticism because it defies recent political trends and contradicts what all other political polls have shown over the last few months
“The fundamentals suggest that Texas is still going to be “red” in November but what this poll and other polls are detecting is that Trump is looking to a margin of victory in the mid to high single digits if the present trends continue," Jones explains.
Jones says if Trump has trouble winning Texas, then he’s already lost other battleground states like Florida, Ohio and Nevada.
Gary Mauro is the head of the Clinton campaign in Texas and says as this poll and others have suggested Trump trails behind Clinton among women and minority voters.
“While Texas is Trump’s state to lose, his inability so far to win any group beyond Anglo men suggests that the Republican nominee has what it takes to lose Texas," Mauro says.
And for those reasons Mauro believes Clinton has a real chance of winning a majority of the presidential votes in Texas. It may also be one of the reasons why the campaign is ramping up more fundraising efforts in Texas.
