Ted Cruz releases new campaign ad; Also let’s talk about that Quinnipiac poll…

This morning Ted Cruz released a new campaign ad on why Texans should vote for him and keep Texas solidly red:

Nice ad. It suits Cruz well.

On a related topic, there’s been a lot of talk about the poll that came out last week that shows Cruz and O’Rourke running a close race. However as the Texas Tribune pointed out, there’s a big problemo with that poll:

This new poll was a survey of registered voters, as opposed to a survey of likely voters. The difference is immense. Texas has 15.2 million registered voters, according to the Secretary of State. Just over 9 million voted in the 2016 election, and presidential elections get the biggest turnouts. In 2014, which was a midterm election year like the year we’re in now, 4.7 million people voted. The folks at Quinnipiac also noted that 53 percent of the registered voters in Texas didn’t yet have an impression of O’Rourke. He’s never run statewide, after all, never been on a ballot outside of El Paso County, and he’s not in the hot part of the campaign season yet.

I went back and read Quinnipiac’s write-up on their poll that we wrote about and for some reason they don’t just come right out and mention that they contacted ‘registered voters’ as opposed to ‘likely voters’. Imagine that. If they had it would have been obvious why this poll was garbage.

Also just to add a little more context to the Tribune’s numbers, a rough calculation of people who voted in this year’s Senate primary for Republicans and Democrats combined was less than 3 million. So maybe we get back to the 4.7 million number from 2014 in November, maybe we don’t. But it the reason why most reputable polls use likely voters.

Read more about the Tribune’s analysis of the Quinnipiac poll here


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