Poll: Donald Trump Leads Joe Biden in the Lone Star State

President Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden (D), the Democrat Party’s presumptive nominee, in Texas — a longtime Republican stronghold Democrats hope to turn blue — a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll released Saturday revealed.

The survey, taken April 10-19, 2020, among 1,200 registered voters across the state, asked respondents, “How would you vote in a presidential election today?”

It showed Trump maintaining his lead in Texas, besting his competitor 49 percent to 44 percent. His lead is outside of the poll’s +/- 2.83 percent margin of error. Seven percent of voters indicated they had no opinion.

While the survey found that preferences are largely split along party lines, “independent voters are on the fence, with 39% favoring Trump, 29% favoring Biden and 32% saying they haven’t formed an opinion,” according to the Tribune:

Trump has a harder race against himself. Ask Texans whether they would vote today to reelect the president and, as they have done in four previous UT/TT polls, they split down the middle: 50% say they would vote for him, 49% said they’d vote against him. Among Republican voters, 81% say they would definitely vote for Trump, and another 11% say they probably would. Democratic voters are just the opposite, with 85% definitely planning to vote for someone else, and 9% probably planning to. Most independent voters — 61% — would vote for someone else, while 39% say they’d vote for the president.

According to Daron Shaw, codirector of the survey, Trump leads in the poll when his Democrat challenger is given a face.

“When you put a flesh-and-blood opponent against them, they do better,” Shaw, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said.

“The reality nationally is that, for the first time in a long time, the incumbent isn’t going to be able to make it a comparison,” he continued.

“It’s going to be a referendum election about how the president is doing. First of all, it’s Trump, Trump, Trump all the time. And all the news is about coronavirus,” he added.

Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Texas by nine percentage points.

The news comes as a CNBC/Change Research poll released this week showed Trump edging out Biden by one percentage point in the battleground states Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.