Second verse, same as the first.
On Wednesday, Texas Lyceum released a poll showing Texas senatorTed Cruz ahead of Democratic representative Beto O’Rourke by only two points in the state’s U. S. Senate race. Democrats across the country will likely cheer about this poll, hoping that it means that Texas (the most populous red state) is turning blue. And some Republicans will likely look at these numbers, see the second-place finisher of their last presidential primary in a tough race and start hyperventilating into a brown paper bag.
But everybody should calm down.
Ted Cruz is still a solid favorite in this race, and one poll shouldn’t shift your opinion wildly.
First, we have a lot of data that suggests that Ted Cruz currently holds a solid lead over O’Rourke. Gravis, YouGov, the University of Texas, Quinnipiac,and JMC Analytics have all polled this race. All their most recent polls put Cruz ahead with leads ranging from five points to 11 points. As of Wednesday morning, RealClearPolitics put Cruz ahead by 8.4 points. At that time, they hadn’t added Texas Lyceum, but it illustrates the overall point: Cruz is ahead in other polls.
In fact, as far as I know the Texas Lyceum poll is the most favorable poll of 2018 for O’Rourke. Only one poll from last year showed a closer race, and that was Texas Lyceum’s April 2017 survey.
Second, the fundamentals suggest an advantage for Cruz. In 2016, Trump won the state by nine points, and Romney won it by 16 points. In 2012, Cruz won his senate race by 16 points and now-Gov. Greg Abbot won his first term in 2014 by 20 points. And Trump, despite having low national approval ratings, is above water in Texas.
Put simply, Texas is still a red state. The national environment certainly favors Democrats (they currently lead the Republicans by seven points in the RealClearPolitics average of generic ballot polls), but as of now it’s not enough to give O’Rourke the advantage. Texas was 11 points more Republican than the nation in 2016, and Cruz is an incumbent. For the time being, those advantages seem to outweigh his disadvantages and put him ahead in this race.
Third, this is just one poll. It’s possible that poll is the beginning of a trend and that Cruz’s position will erode in the coming months. But it’s also possible that this poll (like the April Quinnipiac poll that showed him up by only three points) is a blip on the radar. Sometimes a poll captures an odd sample, or a pollster uses a (defensible) methodology that creates somewhat more Republican or Democratic results. A single poll result that looks off or odd shouldn’t immediately cause people to wildly change their view of a race.
Cruz isn’t guaranteed to win, but he has a real advantage. In last night’s run of the Weekly Standard’s SwingSeat Senate Forecast (before Texas Lyceum) Cruz had an 84 percent win probability. I haven’t done the official model run for today, but the model has a lot of data from Texas. And we’re still early in the campaign season, it takes a long view of polling and attempts not to overreact to new data. This poll will move the model towards O’Rourke, but I would be surprised if the final results end up far from four-to-one odds in Cruz’s favor.
Four to one isn’t a guarantee. If Cruz runs a truly terrible campaign, has some scandal or faces a larger-than-expected national Democratic wave, he could still lose this race. And Cruz’s 2018 showing will likely be worse than his 2012 showing (when he wasn’t an incumbent and the Democrats had a smaller national advantage)
But Cruz is still a real favorite. You don’t have to be a statistician or a professional poker player to recognize that while four-to-one isn’t a guarantee, it’s much better than a coin toss.
