Harris shrinks Trump’s lead in Texas, Allred within striking distance of Cruz, poll finds

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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the Philadelphia rally where she introduced her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

Vice President Kamala Harris trails former President Donald Trump by 5 percentage points in Texas, shaving off nearly half the Republican nominee’s one-time advantage over President Joe Biden from earlier this year, according to a new poll released Thursday.

The survey, conducted earlier this month by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs, is among the first to measure where things stand in Texas since Biden dropped his reelection bid last month. In June, the same pollster found that Trump led Biden by nearly 9 percentage points.

The latest survey also recorded a 2-point lead for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz over his Democratic challenger, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred — virtually unchanged from the June poll. In the new survey, 46.6% of likely voters said they intend to vote for the Republican senator, compared to 44.5% for Allred.

Allred, a Dallas Democrat serving his third term in Congress, is seen as one of his party’s few legitimate hopes for flipping a GOP-controlled Senate seat, in a year where Democrats are largely playing defense across the Senate electoral battlefield.

Allred cited the poll while addressing the Texas delegation Thursday morning at the Democratic National Convention, dismissing Cruz’s modest lead as within the margin of error.

“This is a race that's going to come down to the things that we do together over the next 75 days,” Allred said. “I'm going to be giving you every single thing I've got.”

Cruz is up for reelection for the first time since he defeated Democrat Beto O’Rourke by just 2.6 percentage points in 2018 — Democrats’ closest statewide margin in decades.

At the presidential level, independent voters appeared to drive much of the shift toward Harris: Trump now leads among that voting bloc by just 2 percentage points, down from a 24-point edge in June. Harris also gained ground among women, who now favor her by a 6-point margin after narrowly backing Trump in the Hobby School’s earlier poll.

Trump’s 4.9-point lead in the Hobby School’s latest poll is similar to the 5.6-point margin by which he carried the state over Biden in 2020.

Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon suggested earlier this week that the campaign does not intend to make much of a play for Texas. She noted the high cost of advertising in the state and suggested it would divert resources from other more closely contested states.

“At the end of the day, our responsibility as a presidential campaign is to ensure we get to 270 [electoral votes],” O’Malley Dillon said, fielding audience questions for an event at the Democratic National Convention. “I would love to get to a bigger number than that, but that is all we care about."

Even if Democrats lose atop the ticket, a narrow result could boost the party’s candidates in critical down-ballot races for Congress, the Texas Legislature and scores of local offices. In 2018, when O’Rourke nearly ousted Cruz, Democrats picked up 12 state House seats and flipped two congressional districts, including one where Allred unseated a longtime GOP member of Congress.

Matthew Choi contributed to this report.

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