Talk Elections

Do you approve or disapprove of President Barack Obama’s job performance?

Approve .......................................................... 42%
Disapprove...................................................... 55%

If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee, who would you vote for?

Mike Huckabee ............................................... 55%
Barack Obama................................................ 39%

If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, who would you vote for?

Mitt Romney.................................................... 49%
Barack Obama................................................ 42%

If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Newt Gingrich, who would you vote for?

Newt Gingrich ................................................. 48%
Barack Obama................................................ 43%

If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Sarah Palin, who would you vote for?

Sarah Palin ..................................................... 47%
Barack Obama................................................ 46%

If the candidates for President next year were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Rick Perry, who would you vote for?

Barack Obama................................................ 45%
Rick Perry ....................................................... 45%

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_TX_0120513.pdf

I find it hard to believe that Obama's approvals are 42-55 at Texas but only 46-50 nationally.

favorability / unfavorability:

Mike Huckabee 51%/30% for +21%.
Mitt Romney 40%/37% for +3%.
Newt Gingrich 38%/44% for -6%.
Sarah Palin 42%/53% for -11%.

Mike Huckabee crushed him!

This basically confirms my theory (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=130783.0).

To further complete my map:

Obama vs. Huckabee

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Obama vs. Romney

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Obama vs. Gingrich

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Obama vs. Palin

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Next up: West Virginia & North Carolina.

Huckabee & Gingrich are generic Southern Republicans that will do well in the Bible Belt states.

We already knew this before these polls and 2012 will be more polarizing in these states should one of the 2 guys from above be nominated.

They have no appeal though in western states such as CO, NM, NV - thus securing Obama re-election.

Is it my imagination, or has poundingtherock fled the board like some kind of Tunisian dictator?

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What a day for Palin- Todd affair rumors, tied with Obama in Texas, and Michelle Bachmann announces she's going rogue and giving her own state of the union response.  All just after ceremonies marking the one week anniversary of saying "blood libel".

lol @ Palin's numbers. However, those are pretty strong numbers across the board for Obama, especially since Huckabee likely won't run.

This officially has me concerned about Romney's appeal in the South.  We need to see a poll of GA.  If he's in a statistical tie or behind, that would negate his entire advantage over Huckabee, which is the West.  I think Huckabee can be considered the strongest opponent for now.  He would make PA and especially IA close enough that he could potentially eek out a win without CO and NV.

I'm a bit doubtful on the numbers, but Palin being statistically tied in Texas is laughable. Good God.

I don't see why this poll isn't reasonable. If Obama trails Romney by 7 and Gingrich by just 5, I could definitely see Palin being tied.

Two rival responses to the President's SOTU speech? Egad!

This could indicate the splintering of the GOP.

...If Sarah Palin can't defeat President Obama in Texas, then she might as well drop out of consideration.  What's next? Behind Obama in Kentucky?

if sarah palin was a normal person, she wouldn't even think about running for president. but palin is... palin xD.

Maybe banned?

Texas is clearly a Democratic state in 2012. [/pbrower2a]

Oh, right.

I actually think the Republicans can win without CO, NV or NM. As far as Huck is concerned, I think this is his path to election:

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The light blue areas are places I think he can pick up from Obama 2008. (Huckabee would have lost in 2008, but with the 2010 census, he wins 272-266.)

i think that the democrats should at least attempt in winning Texas. First, it is an electoral goldmine. Second, the state has a democratic history. I believe that since the formation of the two party system in 1856, the state has voted Democratic 24 times, Republican 12 times, and Third Party once (1860).

Obama can campaign here as many times as he want, it still isn't going to swing the state his way.

What are you trying to say?


If Obama makes an effort to win Texas, either
A) Texas is for Obama what Pennsylvania was for Mccain
or
B) Obama has so much campaign money that he has nowhere else to spend it.
or
C) Sarah Palin is running

That's simply a joke at the expense of pbrower, who was always saying that Texas would go to Obama in 2012.

When did he ever say that?  I certainly don't remember him making that claim.

I stand corrected, then. But I do remember him talking a lot about Texas (here (https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=130704.msg2784901#msg2784901), for example). I know, he's not actually saying Obama would win, but still.

Obama can campaign here as many times as he want, it still isn't going to swing the state his way.
[/quote]

What does Obama have that Jimmy Carter, Lyndon  Johnson, Jack Kennedy, Harry Truman, FDR, John Davis, James Cox, Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryant, Alton Parker, Grover Cleveland, Winfield Hancock, Samuel Tilden, Horace Greeley and James Buchanan didn't?

A hard right-wing electorate that has dominated Texas politics for years?

Palin is a non-starter. Being tied in Texas at this stage is not. 2012 is not going to be good for Republicans if she's the nominee (and she will be).

This. Choice A is the most possible scenario. Palin as the nominee would be the GOP waving the white flag until 2016.

     Indeed, Texas has swung dramatically from its Democratic days. If we are to assume that Obama would be competitive there today due to the state's history of voting for Democrats, then by the same logic Vermont must also be competitive for the Republicans.

Indeed, Texas has swung dramatically from its Democratic days. If we are to assume that Obama would be competitive there today due to the state's history of voting for Democrats, then by the same logic Vermont must also be competitive for the Republicans.
[/quote]

The reason why Vermont doesn't vote republican anymore is because the national party has written them off. If the party made it an effort to reason with them, Vermont could vote republican.

Remember that old man Bush, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, Eisenhower, Dewey, Wilkie, Landon, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Hughes, Taft, T. Roosevelt, McKinley, Harrison, Blaine, Garfield, Hayes, Grant, Lincoln and Fremont all won Vermont.

I never said so. I said that it might be significantly closer in 2012, and it might show that Sarah Palin has no real chance to be President.  The PPP poll also shows that Rick Perry has no meaningful support for any Presidential campaign in his own state, whihc is an added bonus of the poll shown.

Face it -- Texas is a difficult state to poll.  It is arguably the most diverse state in a combination of religion, ethnicity, and economic activity. It has several giant cities and perhaps the largest rural population of any state. It can't be considered a region in itself despite its size; indeed it straddles clear regions of America. It is clearly Southwestern (El Paso seems to fit more into Arizona than into any other part of Texas) in parts; East Texas is decidedly Southern (I used to live in Greater Dallas and heard the saying "Shreveport is the capital of East Texas); about everything to the north and west of Fort Worth seems to be Midwestern (the state college in Wichita Falls calls itself "Midwestern State University"); areas  along and to the south of I-10 (including San Antonio and to some extent Houston) seem like a transition zone into another country. Now try to figure where Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, and Houston fit in.

The state is tough to poll. It's possible to poll California, Florida, or New York with smaller sample sizes and smaller margins of error. I really don't trust any poll of Texas for accuracy, and that's not a question of bias. Get too many people from Dallas and too few from San Antonio or vice-versa, and things get distorted.

   
Texas may be no microcosm of America, but it will deliver 38 electoral votes to almost any Republican nominee for President. That is, anyone but Sarah Palin, who seems unable to hold her own against a liberal d@mnyankee politician with more than average melanin content. That may be more relevant than anything else about Texas.


Another possibility: with the nationwide election in the bag, President Obama might seek to help some Democrat replace Kay Bailey Hutchinson in the Senate.   

Again, I was clearly mistaken, I stand corrected now.

What you are forgetting is that the political preferences of the population in a state can change over time. The electorate of Texas in 2011 is not the same as the electorate in 1976. The same can be said about Vermont and every other state.
Vermont and Maine wont swing towards the GOP in 2012 just because Mike Huckabee spends alot of time there, and reminds the voters that the people who lived there in 1936 voted for Alf Landon.

I would like to add that both the Democratic and Republican parties have changed since then as well.

The Democratic party in Texas (and basically the entire south) used to be right-wing. That might explain a few things.

It always had a wing that certainly wasn't though (actually more than one).

To be expected when a party is that big.

     They wrote off Vermont because they can't win it on the Presidential level anymore. The kind of Republican that could win Vermont would have no shot at the nomination today. The very existence of electoral trends more or less refutes the notion that Republicans could win a state today just because they won it regularly 50 years ago.

Texas is a lock for Republicans in 2012, so this poll is microscopic compared to the other polls.

How is it a lock? Huckabee is the only Republican who is over 50%. Yes, it will most likely go Republican, but it certainly isn't a lock.

It appears now that President Obama has about as much chance of winning Texas as he has of losing Pennsylvania. Either way, that's not much.

So how can he win Texas? About everything has to go right.

1. Not many states are in the tier that he must win before winning Texas. After North Carolina that tier includes Missouri, perhaps Indiana, Arizona, and Georgia... maybe the Dakotas and South Carolina. President Obama would need at least 55% of the popular vote with his gains largely in states that he lost in 2008; maybe he has maxed out in some of the states that he won by monster margins.   


2. He has to have good reasons to do campaigning in Texas -- such as making a difference in the Senate race. Texas will have an open seat, and if the Democrats have a strong candidate for the US Senate, then guess who makes some appearances? Where he campaigns, he wins. But that means that the Democrats need a strong candidate. 

3. That of course implies that the Democrats don't have an easier chance to win a Senate seat, whether some incumbent like Corker, Wicker, Brown, (MA) or Kyl (should the opportunity arise) or someone who wins by tea-bagging an incumbent Republican who "isn't conservative enough" and aren't struggling to hold onto the Senate with someone like Brown (OH), Nelson (either one), McCaskill, Stabenow, Tester, or Warner.   

4. He would have to perform well in the suburbs of Dallas and Houston. Obama did badly in those suburbs, much in contrast to suburbs of cities like Detroit and Philadelphia.  Sure, he would have to campaign in places like Arlington, Denton, and Mesquite -- but he would show that he cares about Texas.

4. The war in Afghanistan would have to come to a graceful end. Texas has a large military presence. That is less significant in Texas than in Georgia, an easier target. Such would probably push his approval into the high 50s with a similar vote total. That is good for about an Eisenhower-scale landslide.

5. The Governor could not be on the ballot as a VP candidate. Well, that is unlikely. If the Republicans have enough doubt about carrying Texas  that they would have to nominate Perry for VP, then they are in deep trouble and have all but conceded the Presidency. Texans could conceivably vote for him as VP so that they could get rid of him as Governor.

Much must go right for President Obama to win Texas.     

 

That would be entertaining to see.

He lost Denton County and Fort Worth, and Collin County as well.

Add Plano, Richardson, Lewisville, and Carrollton.

To what? Places he should campaign? Seems a bit gratuitous to me. 

Palin's still doing no worse than Perry after all the nonstop olympic sharkjumping she's engaged in... I know Perry's always been pretty damn weak incumbent for someone who's been in office this long and never even had a seriously close election, but... there's definitely still room between her current polling and rock bottom.

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I'm not sure of the location of the city boundaries of Denton and Fort Worth, but they would have to be dramatically elsewhere from where you'd logically put them for Obama to have lost Fort Worth or polled just 51% in Denton town.
The rest of the Denton County is exurbia (suburbia to the far southeast) and largely dreadful for Democrats, of course.

Obama only won Ft. Worth city with about 53% IIRC. No surprise he lost the county (by almost exactly the same margin as statewide interestingly--bellweather county?) considering the political makeup of Texas suburbs.