July 21, 2020 | By:
Texas Politics Project
For this week's Second Reading Podcast, Jim Henson and Joshua Blank discuss the run-off election results, with a particular focus on the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, as well as the first (of likely many) conversations assessing Texas' competitiveness in the 2020 elections.
July 16, 2020 | By:
Jim Henson,
Joshua Blank
Bereft of a candidate with statewide stature and drowned out by the roar of the COVID-19 pandemic and the related economic calamity, the statewide run-off election to choose a Democratic nominee to challenge John Cornyn’s bid for a fourth term in the U.S. Senate limped to a conclusion Tuesday night, when self-declared outsider M.J. Hegar defeated longtime State Senator Royce West of Dallas by about 4 percentage points. The Texas-politics-as usual feel of this likely evasion, amplified by such a radically changed political environment – the renewed confrontation with racism, the pandemic, the associated economic crash – raise a question: Do fundamental assumptions about both candidates’ positioning made in the early stages of the campaign last year still work for them?
July 14, 2020 | By:
Jim Henson,
Joshua Blank
While we should expect only a very small fraction of the eligible electorate, or even of registered voters, to show up for run-off elections, there is a pretty good crop of run-off races for party nominations. The composition of the electorate is the big unknown here, which has made any early public polling in these races difficult, and, in particular, has contributed to making the public polling in the U.S. Senate run-off a pretty speculative enterprise. But we do have a lot of data from the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll conducted very recently (June 19-29), as well as a lot of comparison and trend data, to illustrate the volatile and generally worried mood of the electorate.
Respondents were asked, "Please tell us whether you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, neither favorable nor unfavorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable opinion of Royce West."
Respondents were asked, "If the 2020 Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate were held today, which of the following candidates would you vote for?" Respondents who said that they hadn’t thought about it enough to have an opinion were asked, “If you had to make a choice, who would you choose?” Results to the first question (Q21B) combined the follow-up (Q21C) are presented in this graphic. Results are presented for those respondents who said that they intend to vote in the 2020 Democratic Primary Election in item Q3B (n=575 potential Democratic Primary voters for the trial ballot, and n=557 potential Democratic Primary voters for the vote certainty and second choice items).
Respondents were asked, "If the 2020 Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate were held today, which of the following candidates would you vote for?"
Respondents were asked, "Which of the following potential 2020 Democratic U.S. Senate primary candidates have you heard of?"
Respondents were asked, "Which of the following potential 2020 Democratic U.S. Senate primary candidates have you heard of?"
July 23, 2019 | By:
Jim Henson,
Joshua Blank
The recent addition of two more names to the list of Democratic primary candidates vying to face incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn again raises the immediate question of Cornyn’s prospects in 2020. We focus on University of Texas/Texas Tribune Polling data to look at Cornyn’s position among the Texas electorate to assess the position of the U.S. Senator that has held the office since 2002, a political eternity for a Texas Republican Party that took control of the state the same year. Cornyn was there at the beginning of the period of GOP dominance and has risen to one of the top positions in the Republican caucus in the U.S. Senate. Yet his standing in his home state, even through two successful reelection campaigns, has always suffered in comparison both to the political leaders that were his contemporaries and to the more recent generation of GOP elected officials who rose in his shallow wake.
