Could Texas Go Blue This November?

*Earlier this year the thought of Texas turning blue was a distant goal for state Democrats. Demography showed it was inevitable, just not this year. Donald Trump has changed things and the possibility of a blue Texas by November is real. VL

By Alex Samuels, Texas Tribune (1.5 minute read)

A new Washington Post-SurveyMonkey poll shows Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the major parties’ nominees for president, virtually tied atop a four-way race in Texas, each earning 40 percent of the state’s electoral votes.

Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein fill out the four-candidate field in the survey. As the poll notes, “Texas splits about evenly between Clinton and Trump in the new poll. That’s a significant change from past elections in the traditionally Republican stronghold.” When the poll asked to choose between just Clinton and Trump, the Democratic presidential nominee received 46 percent of the vote to Trump’s 45 percent. Nine percent registered no opinion.

However, many were skeptical about the poll’s results, especially since the findings contradict other polls. As the National Review’s Jim Geraghty puts it, “the results just seem odd all around, with a lot of states that looked to be leaning heavily in one direction in other polls appearing neck-and-neck in this survey.”

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As the Tribune’s Ross Ramsey reports, no Democrat has won Texas since 1976, when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford. However, the state hasn’t seen a general election race for president this close for a while. And while operatives in both camps say they believe the state will retain its reputation as predominantly Republican, as Ramsey notes, “nothing is impossible.”

This article was originally published in The Texas Tribune.

[Phtoto by Gary Rosenfeld/Flickr]