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Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D) has a 4-point lead over state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in the Lone Star State’s Senate race, according to a new survey.
The Texas Pulse/Texas A&M Bush School poll, released Friday, shows 47 percent of likely Texas voters plan to support Talarico while 43 percent chose Paxton. In the group’s June survey, the two candidates were tied at 46 percent.
“The movement over the last two months is largely seen by looking at independent voters who now favor Talarico by 23 points,” ReconMR Senior Research Analyst Lindsey Hendren, who was cited in the latest survey, said.
Among independents, Talarico leads Paxton 53 percent to 30 percent, the poll found.
The poll offers an encouraging sign for Democrats as they look to make inroads in Texas, where Republicans have dominated statewide elections for decades.
Women favor Talarico over Paxton with 53 percent support to the attorney general’s 40 percent. On the other side, the state’s top prosecutor leads the lawmaker among men with 47 percent to 41 percent, respectively, according to the numbers.
Talarico also holds sizable support from younger voters, with 66 percent of those aged 18 to 34 backing the Democrat compared with 23 percent for the GOP candidate, who was backed by President Trump.
Support for the candidates is also widely based on geography, underscoring the state’s political divide.
“Talarico leads by wide margins in the Austin and Dallas/Ft. Worth regions, while Paxton has a large lead in the rural parts of the state, and the Houston and San Antonio regions are currently very closely divided,” Hendren said.
Talarico also outperformed Paxton on most of the issues tested in the poll. Voters favored the Democrat over Republican on affordability, keeping Texans safe and managing the state’s water supply.
The only issue Paxton had a slight advantage was securing the southern border with Mexico. Voters also viewed the attorney general as tougher than Talarico, but also more corrupt, according to the analysis.
“The good news for Talarico is that voters think he is honest, authentic, in touch with Texas values, and that he’s not corrupt,” said Veteran pollster and Texas A&M Visiting Professor Clifford Young. “The bad news for him is that voters by a narrow margin don’t think he’s tough.”
“For Paxton, the good news is voters think he’s tough. But the bad news is that a majority or plurality of voters say that Paxton is not honest, authentic, or in touch with Texas values,” Young continued. “And even worse, by a 55-35% margin, voters say Paxton is corrupt.”
The survey was conducted July 27-30 among 619 likely Texas voters, using a combination of landline, cellphone and text-to-web responses. The overall margin of error was plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.
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