New CBS News/YouGov polls show President Donald Trump is in trouble in three states he won in 2016. He's tied with former Vice President Joe Biden in Arizona (46% to 46%), a state he won by four points in 2016. Trump's down 48% to 42% in Florida, a state he took by a point in 2016.
But it's the third state, Texas, where the eye popping result comes from. It's Trump 46% to Biden's 45%, a result well within any margin of error.
It's pretty clear looking at the data that Texas is a swing state in the 2020 election. The 2020 campaign could be the first time Democrats captured the Lone Star State in a presidential election since 1976.
The CBS News/YouGov poll is not an outlier over the last month. There have been eight polls released publicly since the beginning of June. The result is that Biden and Trump are basically tied, with Biden up by a mere 0.3 points in Texas.
Importantly, and unlike in other states, the polls in Texas have not overestimated Democrats over the last few cycles. If anything Democrats actually slightly outperformed their final polls in the 2016 presidential race and 2018 Senate races.
Things may change the closer we get to the election, but Texas really is competitive at this point.
Texas has gotten progressively more competitive during Trump's time as a candidate and officeholder. A big statewide victory has eluded Democrats, though many races have come within single digits for the first time in a generation. In fact, the state seemed, if anything, to move to the left in 2018, as Democrats were able to achieve wins in some key congressional races.
A Biden win would be a manifestation of that trend on the statewide level.
Four years ago, Hillary Clinton lost Texas by nine points. She was the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the state by only single digits since the 1990s.
If you look nationally, you see Biden is up about 10 points compared to Clinton's two point popular vote win. If you shift the Texas result by eight points, he should be down just a point to Trump.
There are reasons to think that Biden could be doing even better than this eight point shift would imply.
In 2018, Democrat Beto O'Rourke came within three points of knocking off Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. It was the best Democratic performance in a Texas Senate race since 1988.
It wasn't just O'Rourke who came close. The Democratic candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor finished within five points of their Republican opponents.
As I noted last year, the reason the Democrats are doing so well in Texas is a shift among college educated white voters. You see this best in the suburbs of Austin, Dallas and Houston, where O'Rourke did disproportionately better than the Democratic Senate did six years prior.
Indeed, Texas' white voter population is very well educated. One calculation by the New York Times' Nate Cohn reveals that a little more than 42% of the 2020 likely white voters in Texas have a college degree. That's 13th highest in the nation and the most of any state Trump carried in 2016.
As the old adage goes, Texas isn't a red, blue, or purple state. It's a non-voting state, with basically the lowest turnout of any of the ten most populous states at 51.1% in 2016. (interestingly enough, New York is almost just as bad but its larger urban percentage tilts it towards the Dems, although it does explain how Republicans keep ending up as governor.)
Basically if Texas's turnout was higher, it would be a blue state.
Having said that, while I appreciate Texas is in a unique position in 2020, overlooking Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin again will prove fatal to a Biden win, Texas or no. Yes, a Texas win will break Trump's back, but if it comes at the expense of those three states, Trump comes out ahead with 43 electoral votes compared to Texas's 38. Trump *would* have to capture either Nevada, Minnesota, or New Hampshire and run the table on all the other swing states, but it's not a guaranteed Biden win.
I appreciate that Texas is genuinely in play.
But Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan are where Biden and his team need to be concentrating on right now, and throughout the election.
Besides, the amount of voter suppression shenanigans in Texas will almost guarantee a Trump win there. Better to carve a path through the Rust Belt, and then move to put Trump away for good.
Right now, Biden's lead in WI, MI, and PA aren't too much larger than Texas.
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