Ted Cruz Says Democrats Taking Short-Term Immigration Risks for Long-Term Gains; Can You Trust the Polls That Say Texas Could Go Blue?: Lone Star State Democrats have a History of Polling Well, and Falling Short, So We Looked at Whether This Year Might Be Different

Ted Cruz says Democrats taking short-term immigration risks for long-term gains:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is locked in a fierce battle for reelection this year, but he doesn’t necessarily consider that his biggest challenge. “In the 12 years I’ve been in the Senate, I have consistently led the fight to secure our border,” he told the Washington Examiner. “It is today I believe in an existential threat to Texas and to our nation.”

Cruz is campaigning heavily on his work, sometimes on a bipartisan basis, to mitigate the pressure on the border. This includes authoring successful amendments mandating information-sharing between the Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to safeguard the maritime border as well as promoting new security initiatives from South Padre Island to Port Mansfield. This includes funding for an air station at one Texas Coast Guard facility and an aerostat radar system.

But Cruz is keenly aware of the national implications of a porous border and believes that if it is not gotten under control, the results will not be good for his country or party.

Texas is ground zero for President Joe Biden’s border crisis. The threat Cruz warned about has not abated since Vice President Kamala Harris, once tasked with addressing the “root causes” of uncontrolled migration at the southern border, replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

“They are trying desperately to run away from [their] record, including the absurd gaslighting of now denying that she was ever the border czar,” Cruz said. “Joe Biden very publicly named her the border czar. In her entire time as vice president, she has been to the border only once. And she chose to go to El Paso and not what was then the epicenter of the crisis, which was the Rio Grande Valley.”

More than 10 million illegal immigrants have streamed across the border since the Biden-Harris administration took office, a figure that does not count nearly 2 million known “gotaways” who have evaded federal authorities. The consequences of this level of unregulated migration are felt far from border states like Texas, dominating the headlines in places like New York and Colorado.

Naturally, this has gone over poorly with the voters. Biden receives some of his lowest marks on his handling of immigration and the border. When Biden dropped out of the presidential race, his job approval rating on immigration was 32 points underwater, according to a Wall Street Journal poll. The national RealClearPolitics polling average on this issue found that 34.4% of voters approve of the job Biden has done, while 61.6% disapprove. Just this month, with the migration numbers somewhat improved, an Economist-YouGov survey gave Biden a 36% approval rating in this area.

Immigration is one of several reasons Harris had worse poll numbers than Biden for much of her vice presidency before the big ticket switch. Her allies derided her policy portfolio as “trash,” expressing concern she was being set up to fail. The Rev. Al Sharpton told the Root in 2021 that he planned to take up the matter with Biden. “I want to see her be used more effectively, and I think her being in charge of voting was important, but I question her other assignments,” Sharpton said at the time.

Harris has attempted a rebrand on immigration since she leapfrogged Biden for the top spot, not limited to memory-holing the border czar label. One of her early presidential campaign ads tried to make her sound like, well, Ted Cruz. —>READ MORE HERE

Can You Trust the Polls That Say Texas Could Go Blue?

Lone Star State Democrats have a history of polling well, and falling short, so we looked at whether this year might be different.

Before Colin Allred’s campaign even got word of the late August poll, the news had already spread to social media. Democrats gleefully touted that the congressman, who represents a Dallas-based district in the U.S. House, was on his way to unseating Senator Ted Cruz. The survey, from the University of Houston and Texas Southern University, found that Cruz led Allred by roughly two percentage points (47 percent to 45), within the margin of error. The party quickly pounced on the news. Though Allred had not been publicly scheduled to speak at the Democratic National Convention, just minutes after the poll dropped, a new speaking lineup included his name. “On November 5,” an email sent that day from campaign manager Paige Hutchinson read, “Colin Allred is going to beat Ted Cruz and give Texas the leadership we need.”

This might seem like a familiar story. Palpable excitement among the Texas Democratic base in the lead-up to elections, followed by crushing defeat in November, is not new; in fact, it happens around this time every two years. The cycle goes like this: A somewhat high-profile Democrat (let’s say, Beto O’Rourke or MJ Hegar) receives a smattering of polls that suggests they could finally flip a statewide seat and end the Democrats’ three-decades-long losing streak. Then more polls come out showing that these races may be close, but they’re not that close. Finally, come Election Day, the Republican candidate ekes out a win. (On August 1, 2018, for example, Texas Lyceum released a poll showing the race between Cruz and O’Rourke, his then-challenger, in a dead heat. Cruz later won his reelection bid by roughly three percentage points.)

Right on cue, just a few weeks after August’s UH/TSU poll, a handful of surveys found Allred down by a greater margin—though most within single digits. He’s losing by ten percentage points according to ActiVote, four points according to Emerson College, five according to Morning Consult, seven according to Quantas Polls and News, and eight according to the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

Given the gyrations in Cruz’s and Allred’s standing in the polls, and Texas Democrats’ history of not winning, can you trust surveys suggesting that the Dems might flip the Senate seat? Which polls are accurate, and how should you read them? We put together guidelines for how to temper or stoke your hopes or fears of a blue Texas.

• Don’t get too excited by outliers. The UH/TSU poll was particularly favorable to Allred. But avoid the temptation to overreact to individual polls; it’s more helpful to use polling averages and to look at trends in the results found over time. In this case, both the UH/TSU and the ActiVote polls stand out from the pack. Since the March primary elections, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of the race, Cruz had led Allred by an average of nearly seven percentage points. Although a favorable poll can sometimes mean the start of a new trend, it is often a fluke. 

• Pay attention to possible methodical issues. It’s impractical to survey the entire state, so pollsters select a sample of Texans. That sample should represent the state—but it does so only in theory. You should always look at how many people were polled and whether the demographics are a reflection of the Texas electorate. Is it weighted to properly represent voters without a college degree, who are less likely to respond to pollsters? Does it match Texas’s demographics, or does it specifically match the demographics of voters, who are disproportionately older and whiter?

The margin of error (sometimes labeled as “MOE” or a “confidence interval”) will increase as sample size gets smaller; between 1,000 to 1,400 respondents is considered good for a statewide survey. In this case, the Texas Politics Project and Quantas surveys seem to be the best polls—if we’re grading them on this metric alone. (In both survey methodologies, too, the pollsters noted that respondents were matched to a representative sample of Texas’s electorate, by age, education, gender, and race.) And unlike ActiVote, which surveyed only four hundred likely voters, both the Texas Politics Project and Quantas have smaller error margins. That’s the pollsters’ way of disclosing that their survey might not be exact but that it gets within a certain number of percentage points. —>READ MORE HERE

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