Polls & Lawsuits: Don’t Mess With Texas

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Ever since the debate between Ted Cruz and Colin Allred last month in the Senate race, the GOP mantra has been “keep Texas Texas.” Cruz himself has used it in ads, and TV spots featuring Governor Greg Abbott use the slogan to go after Allred as well. 

It turned into official government policy today. The Department of Justice dispatched federal monitors to polls in 27 states, including Texas — until late yesterday. Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the DoJ and forced them to withdraw their observers to at least 100 feet outside of voting locations. That turns them from ‘monitors’ to spectators:

Paxton argued that no federal statute authorizes federal agents to monitor state elections when they are prohibited by state law.

According to a new court filing, the Department of Justice agreed that election monitors will remain at least 100 feet outside the polling and central count locations as required by Texas law and “will not interfere with voters attempting to vote” as is consistent with its longstanding practice but can speak with voters who are willing to do so.

“Texans run Texas elections, and we will not be bullied by the Department of Justice,” Paxton said in a Tuesday news release. “The DOJ knows it has no authority to monitor Texas elections and backed down when Texas stood up for the rule of law. No federal agent will be permitted to interfere with Texas’s free and fair elections.”

he lawsuit remains active, Paxton notes in his statement, in order to ensure that the DoJ does not renege and does not attempt to enter polling stations or interfere with Texas election operations. The DoJ sure gave up easy in this lawsuit, though, and that’s curious. What exactly did they hope to accomplish? Did they have any reasonable suspicion of violations occurring, or did they just want to undermine confidence in the election results from Texas?

What about the other effort to Keep Texas Texas? Considerable speculation has swirled that Cruz could lose to Allred, and of course that won’t get firmly settled until the votes get counted after polls close tonight. However, there has not been one poll in this cycle showing Allred ahead or even tied going all the way back to December in RCP’s aggregation. 

The final poll from Atlas Intel puts Cruz up by seven points, 52.5/45.5, and Donald Trump up almost ten over Kamala Harris, 53.7/44. We’ll get to the presidential-race breakdown in a moment, but let’s take a look at the demos in the Senate race. Allred carries a couple of notable demos, including a 55/44 advantage among respondents who refuse to identify their gender. (I am a bit amazed that Cruz gets 44% in that demo, frankly.) 

Allred does better in traditional Democrat demos, too, but not well enough. He wins the two younger age demos, but gets blown out in the two older demos; seniors go to Cruz 65/34. Cruz also wins every income demo, but only barely edges Allred among the >$100K demo by less than a point. Allred and Democrats have leaned heavily on the class-warfare argument here, but Cruz wins a wide majority in the <$50K demo, 55.3/42.1. Allred does well among independents, 54.5/40.3, but this is a heavily Republican state. Cruz also manages to get 26% of the black vote and 40.5% of Hispanics, too. 

How does Trump do in the demos? He outperforms Cruz in most of these on the full-ballot survey, but mainly incrementally. (Amusingly, Trump also gets 44% in the non-binary vote despite heavy GOP messaging about Harris’ radical agenda on transgender issues.) Trump does slightly better than Cruz among younger voters as well as Hispanic voters, and wins a majority in all income demos. Harris wins a majority of independents but underperforms Allred, 50.1/42. 

So much for that Houston rally and the Beyoncé bait-and-switch last week!

Nothing is guaranteed, of course, but for Texas to turn blue — even in the Senate race — we would have to suffer an industry-wide polling collapse and a character transformation of a state on a scale unprecedented in American politics. For now, it looks like the Keep Texas Texas project will roll to a successful finish tonight. 

Join us tonight in our live blog, starting at 7 pm ET! The whole Hot Air crew will be there, and we’ll also have Cam Edwards from Bearing Arms and Duane Patterson too. Sign up for a VIP membership to take part in the comments section.