Almost a month ago, back in early October, Quinnipiac came out with a poll that showed Ted Cruz with a 9 point lead over Beta. But just a few weeks later, the same poll shows Cruz with a much smaller lead:
TEXAS TRIBUNE – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, leads El Paso Democrat Beto O’Rourke by 5 percentage points, according to a new poll from Quinnipiac University.
The poll, released Monday with just over a week left before Election Day, found that 51 percent of likely voters favor Cruz and 46 favor O’Rourke, with just 3 percent undecided. Early voting in Texas is well underway, with numbers at historic highs that have given both campaigns reason for optimism.
Nearly all polling of the unusually competitive U.S. Senate race in Texas has found Cruz leading. A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll released last week found a similar margin of 6 points. Quinnipiac’s last poll of the race, released Oct. 11, found Cruz leading by 9 percentage points.
This week’s poll was conducted Oct. 22 to 28. It surveyed 1,078 voters with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
So this time around they surveyed MORE likely voters and got a lower margin of error. In the poll earlier this month, they surveyed only 730 Texas likely voters with a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percentage points.
But here’s something else of note. In the earlier poll, they found Greg Abbott leading Lupe Valdez by 20 points, 58-38. But in today’s poll they found him leading by only 14 points, 54 – 40.
So they increase the population of likely voters and the leads for both Abbott and Cruz shrinks by 35% and 57% respectively. The fact that they both shrink substantially indicates to me that just maybe the race isn’t really shrinking that much between Cruz and Beto, that the shrinkage had more to do with the population changes.
But hey, I’m not a pollster and always hated statistics class. So I could be completely wrong. Here’s the earlier poll and today’s poll if you want to compare.