As President Donald Trump wages his rejection of "fake polling," results from a media poll in Texas have the president's re-election as a 50-50 proposition, including 60% of independents saying they would vote for someone else in the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.
"The most interesting and more consequential thing, this far out, is that amongst independents, 60% say they will probably or definitely vote for somebody else," Texas Politics Project pollster Joshua Blank told the Tribune. "Overall, Texas independents tend to be more conservative than liberal and tend to look more like Republicans than like Democrats . . . and things have gotten worse among independents."
Among all voters in the poll, a combined 50% say they will definitely (39%) or probably (11%) vote for President Trump's re-election, while another combined 50% say the opposite, they will probably not (7%) or definitely not (43%) vote to re-elect Trump.
"That 50-50 number encapsulates how divisive Trump is," the poll's co-director James Henson told the Tribune.
Texas has long been considered a reliably Republican state, but Democrats have made strides — narrowly losing 2018 midterm races, including former Democrat Rep. Beto O'Rourke's challenge of GOP Sen. Ted Cruz — therefore putting more emphasis on the independent vote tally in the state.
"As the state becomes more competitive along partisan lines, at the same time it remains polarized, independents matter more," Henson told the Tribune. "For a long time, we didn't have any reason to pay attention to them."
Former Vice President Joe Biden (23%) leads the Democratic primary field by 8 points over O'Rourke (15%) and RealClearPolitics has Biden leading Trump by 2.5 percentage points, albeit mostly within the margin of error.
The University of Texas/Texas Tribune polled 1,200 registered voters over the Internet from May 31-June 9 with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.83 percentage points.
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