Kamala Harris moved to within striking distance of Donald Trump in Texas on Friday when two new polls found the former president leading here by 5 points or less after losing significant ground with President Joe Biden out of the White House race.
An Emerson College poll for The Hill showed Trump up on Harris in Texas by 4 points. Trump had a 5-point advantage over the vice-president in his home base of Florida. A University of Texas poll that was conducted in the final week of August and released today had Trump leading Harris by 5 points in Texas.
Trump enjoyed leads on the verge of double-digits in Texas and Florida before Biden dropped out of the contest and rallied behind Harris in July. The nation's second and third largest states could be in play based on the new polling numbers.
But the Emerson College/The Hill and UT Texas Politics Project polls provided dramatically different snapshots of the fall fight that pits U.S. Senator Ted Cruz against U.S. Rep. Colin Allred in the number two race on the November ballot. The Emerson poll found a thriller shaping up in the U.S. Senate contest with Cruz up by only 2 points on the Democratic challenger. But the UT survey had Cruz leading Allred by 8 points.
Cruz leads the Democrat by 6 points based on the average of eight polls that were taken on the Senate competition in the past four months. Trump has been ahead of Harris by 6 points on average as well in polls on the Texas electorate since the start of August.
The ABC News site FiveThirtyEight showed Harris in front of Trump in Texas by 4.4 percentage points on Friday based on an aggregation of polling here. Trump led Harris by 4.2 points in Florida based on the 538 calculation.
Trump has chipped into small Harris leads in recent days in battleground states that Biden carried in 2020 like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Georgia. Trump is up by one-half of 1 percentage point in Arizona based on the 538 average. Trump trailed Harris, however, by 0.6 points in the Nevada polling averages by Friday evening.
But the race for the presidency is closer now in Texas and Florida than it's been at any point up to now based on the FiveThirtyEight aggregations. Trump defeated Biden in Texas by 5.6 points in 2020 when he won in Florida by 4.7 points.
Cruz probably can expect to see his support rise or fall with Trump's in a race that's been harder for the pollsters to predict than the president battle.
Cruz led Allred 49 percent to 47 percent in the Emerson College poll. The incumbent had 44 percent compared to 36 percent for Allred in a UT survey that found a large number of voters undecided on the Senate clash.
Independent Polls of Texas Voters for November 5 General Election |
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