Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a virtual tie in Texas, according to a University of Houston poll. It’s a fair sized sample of 1,000 registered voters who are certain or very likely to vote on or before election day. At the same time, a Washington Post/Survey Monkey poll gave Donald Trump just two percentage points of advantage.
Apparently the GOTV and almost unprecedented scale of Democratic efforts in Texas are paying off but there is still a lot of work to be done. Meanwhile, some conservative counties are beginning to turn blue before our eyes. Says Cynthia Ginyard, chair of the Fort Bend County Democratic Party:
“It’s unreal, it’s surreal,” said Cynthia Ginyard, chair of the county Democratic party. “We are known as a red state and we know that. Our goal was always to change that. We didn’t realise that the possibility was so near.
“Inasmuch as I want to give us a pat on the back for working hard, some of it just happened along the way,” she continued, citing a big voter registration effort as evidence of the former and an anti-Trump bump as the wildcard element.
The registration efforts were awesome. The Fort Bend County Democrats have registered some 4,000 new Muslim voters and they are almost certainly not registering in order to vote for Trump. And this piece makes no mention of the Latino population, which has registered in much greater numbers this cycle as well. Now we need to shift to the GOTV efforts in order to get those newly registered voters to actually show up to vote.
I’d also like to predict at this point that I think Trump is going to shockingly underperform in Texas. Why? Not only has the orange faced shit gibbon always been unpopular here but also because if the polling companies are still using the old model of an apathetic Hispanic participation, they are in for a rude awakening on November 9. I think Hillary wins the state by two or three and gets the 38 EVs at this point. We’ll also pick up some House seats and I really wish one or both Senators were running this cycle. Preferably Calgary Cruz.
Just my little limb walk.