A recently-released poll shows President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, are tied in the key battleground state of Texas.
The Dallas Morning News/University of Texas at Tyler survey found that Trump and Biden enjoy 43 percent approval of respondents, while 5 percent support “other” White House candidates. Nine percent remain undecided. The poll, conducted between April 18 and 27, is made up of 1,183 registered voters and has a margin of error of +/- 2.85 percentage points. “The survey asked additional questions of 447 registered voters who indicated they voted in the Democratic primary, with a margin of error of +/- 4.64%,” notes the Dallas Morning News. The same poll conducted in February showed the president holding a slim one-point lead over his apparent Democrat rival.
“Whether Texas becomes a battleground in November is up to Joe Biden,” UT-Tyler political scientist Mark Owens judged in an interview with the Dallas Morning News. “Does he want to put resources in the state?”
Although the poll shows a possible tight race between the two White House candidates, a University of Texas/Texas Tribune survey released in late April showed Trump ahead of Biden by a margin of 49 percent to 44 percent. The poll, taken between April 10 and 19, had 1,200 registered voters as respondents, with a +/- 2.83 percent margin of error. 7 percent of respondents said they held no opinion about the candidates.
“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,” Daron Shaw, who co-directed of the poll, said at the time.
In 2016, Trump defeated his then-Democrat White House rival, Hillary Clinton, in the Lone Star state by nine percentage points.
The last Democrat presidential contender to win Texas was Jimmy Carter in 1976 over Republican incumbent Gerald Ford.