About those Beto-Texas polls

In an update to my post last week about the proposed series of Beto O'Rourke-Ted Cruz debates, I noted some new polls that were in the hopper.

A new Lyceum poll shows a statistical dead heat, which is going to up the ante for these debates. Cruz staff is trashing it. That said, it seems in some ways to stand up to my eyeballs, with both voters and likely voters, and with Abbott leading Valdez by 20 percentage points. However, There are other areas where it's an eyebrow-raiser.

Nine percent of Texans are atheist or agnostic? Well, maybe not. And, Beto-Bob is within 2 percentage points on likely as well as regular voters? Plus, counting 22 percent as either unaligned or third party, Lyceum claimed respondents were otherwise split, 39 percent each on Doinks and Rethugs. That's an eyebrow raiser there. This is all why the likes of Kuff are wrong in relying on registered voter, not likely voter, feedback.

At the same time, even among college-educated whites, it shows that Beto's unknown factor is two-thirds that of Valdez. Interestingly, by percentage points, the gap is almost as big with Hispanics as with whites; it's closest with black voters, tho Lyceum has Beto-Bob within two points on BOTH. Anyway, the lack of identification issue also seems to run true.

That said, on things like atheism-agnosticism, politicos often rate their voters as more conservative than reality, and while not every atheist or agnostic bats left, nonetheless ....

Moving on, a Quinnipiac poll Aug. 2 shows Havana Ted with a 6-point advantage. PPP then splits the diff at 4 points. Public Policy Polling, which is Democratic-tied and has been wrong before due to that comes close to push polling. And it frames things Beto's way by talking about how he doesn't take PAC money while not noting the various asterisks that come with that, like that nobody running for Congress can take money from corporate or union PACs.

On the other hand, Havana Ted is now worried enough to ask Trump to campaign for him.