Texas is a swing state in 2020, new polls reveal

Texas is a swing state in 2020, new polls reveal

Texas is a swing state in 2020, new polls reveal

(CNN)New CBS News/YouGov polls show President Donald Trump is in trouble in three states he won in 2016. He's tied with former Vice President Joe Biden in Arizona (46% to 46%), a state he won by four points in 2016. Trump's down 48% to 42% in Florida, a state he took by a point in 2016.

But it's the third state, Texas, where the eye popping result comes from. It's Trump 46% to Biden's 45%, a result well within any margin of error.

It's pretty clear looking at the data that Texas is a swing state in the 2020 election. The 2020 campaign could be the first time Democrats captured the Lone Star State in a presidential election since 1976.

The CBS News/YouGov poll is not an outlier over the last month. There have been eight polls released publicly since the beginning of June. The result is that Biden and Trump are basically tied, with Biden up by a mere 0.3 points in Texas.

Importantly, and unlike in other states, the polls in Texas have not overestimated Democrats over the last few cycles. If anything Democrats actually slightly outperformed their final polls in the 2016 presidential race and 2018 Senate races.

View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling

Things may change the closer we get to the election, but Texas really is competitive at this point.

Texas has gotten progressively more competitive during Trump's time as a candidate and officeholder. A big statewide victory has eluded Democrats, though many races have come within single digits for the first time in a generation. In fact, the state seemed, if anything, to move to the left in 2018, as Democrats were able to achieve wins in some key congressional races.

A Biden win would be a manifestation of that trend on the statewide level.

Four years ago, Hillary Clinton lost Texas by nine points. She was the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the state by only single digits since the 1990s.

If you look nationally, you see Biden is up about 10 points compared to Clinton's two point popular vote win. If you shift the Texas result by eight points, he should be down just a point to Trump.

There are reasons to think that Biden could be doing even better than this eight point shift would imply.

In 2018, Democrat Beto O'Rourke came within three points of knocking off Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. It was the best Democratic performance in a Texas Senate race since 1988.

It wasn't just O'Rourke who came close. The Democratic candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor finished within five points of their Republican opponents.

As I noted last year, the reason the Democrats are doing so well in Texas is a shift among college educated white voters. You see this best in the suburbs of Austin, Dallas and Houston, where O'Rourke did disproportionately better than the Democratic Senate did six years prior.

Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/07/12/politics/texas-swing-state-2020-election-polls/index.html