Joshua Blank

The vice presidential candidates – Republican J.D. Vance and Democrat Tim Walz – will get their evening to shine next week as they participate in what is likely to be their only debate of the 2024 campaign at 8:00 PM Central Time on Tuesday evening, October 1. The August 2024 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll was fielded after the announcement of both vice presidential picks, and included items assessing the extent to which Texas voters hold favorable, or unfavorable opinions of each. 

A new round of interventions in the voting process by Texas state officials coincides with the reemergence of widespread doubts about elections and voting among Republican voters in the most recent statewide polling by the Texas Politics Project. The latest actions of state officials and new evidence of the persistence of doubts about the conduct of elections among Republican voters emerge from the rhetoric and policy of elected officials that have shaped public attitudes since the turn of the 21st century. These latest manifestations of declining trust in the electoral process, inflamed by Donald Trump's insistent propagation of the fiction that elections are being corrupted by the votes of undocumented immigrants, suggest that Texans are approaching the Rubicon in terms of their ability to maintain shared trust in the state's deployment of democracy.

The much-anticipated, lone presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is one of the rare occasions where the breathless coverage leading up to the Tuesday evening event probably isn’t grossly over-hyped. It’s a lot, to be sure; but given the impact of the first presidential debate, it’s hard to argue that the stakes aren’t high, whether or not the debate lives up to the anticipation

The latest University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll finds former president Donald Trump leading Vice-President Kamala Harris 49% to 44% in a head-to-head match-up in the presidential race in Texas. Nine percent chose an unspecified “someone else,” and 6% were undecided. This result follows a June UT/Texas Politics Project Poll in which then-candidate Joe Biden trailed Trump by 7 points, 46% to 39%. 

Whatever the mix of factors — a lack of awareness of the specifics of what the legislature has tried to do, the extreme complexity of the issues involved, or a general lack of trust in political institutions — polling throughout the two sessions has shown a consistent a lack of confidence in what the state’s political leadership is doing to increase the reliability and resilience of the grid.

While not the current nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris has emerged as the clear front-runner for the nomination as Democrats look to coalesce around an alternative to President Biden now that he's ended his 2024 campaign.

With the 2024 presidential candidates preparing to take the stage Thursday evening for an unprecedented June debate in what is already shaping up to be an unprecedented election, the University of Texas/Texas Politics Project polling archive provides key insights into where each candidate stands in Texas, and where each candidate stands among the key voting blocs that will determine the outcome of the election.

The latest University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll, conducted immediately after a New York jury convicted former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, finds more than half of Texas Republican voters saying his conviction makes them more likely to vote for him in November.

The convictions have had only a small impact on the overall shape of the Presidential race in Texas less than five months before Election Day. The poll finds Donald Trump maintaining a 7-point lead over Joe Biden, 46% to 39%, in a head-to-head match-up in Texas, while maintaining a 9-point lead, 43% to 34%, in a trial ballot including independent and third-party candidates. In the expanded trial ballot, 8% chose Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, along with 2% for Jill Stein, 2% for Cornel West, less than 1% for Chase Oliver, and 10% had no opinion.

The independent presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has had operatives in both the Trump and Biden camps worried at various times about Kennedy’s potential for siphoning votes from their candidates. National and state-level polling has generally demonstrated that as Kennedy’s candidacy attracts more public attention (certainly relative to other non-major party aspirants to the presidency), he tends to be viewed more favorably by Republicans than by Democrats – which as of the April 2024 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll seems to be the case in Texas, too.

A battery of questions in the latest University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll, and years of data on abortion attitudes in the state, suggest that voters view access to legal abortion with much more nuance than either our inherited labels or the monolithic positions adopted by the two parties admit. While this nuance is bipartisan, the lack of absolutist views is most notable, and most consequential, among Republican voters whose candidates must claim credit, or take blame, for engineering the rollback in abortion rights that is the new political reality in the U.S. – especially in Texas.