Poll: Harris shrinks Trump's lead in Texas – and Ted Cruz's re-election hangs in the balance

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According to a new poll released Thursday, Vice President Kamala Harris is five percentage points behind former President Donald Trump in Texas, shrinking the Republican candidate's lead over President Joe Biden from earlier this year by almost half.

The poll, conducted earlier this month by the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs, is one of the first to examine the situation in Texas since Biden dropped his re-election bid last month. In June, the same polling firm found Trump was ahead of Biden by nearly 9 percentage points.

The latest poll also showed a two-percentage-point lead for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz over his Democratic challenger, U.S. Representative Colin Allred – virtually unchanged from the June poll. In the new poll, 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 of capturing a Republican-controlled Senate seat in a year when Democrats are largely on the defensive in Senate elections.

Allred cited the poll in his speech to the Texas delegation at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday morning, dismissing Cruz's modest lead as within the margin of error.

“This race is about what we do together over the next 75 days,” Allred said. “I'm going to give you everything I've got.”

Cruz is facing re-election for the first time since defeating Democrat Beto O'Rourke in 2018 by just 2.6 percentage points – the Democrats' smallest nationwide lead in decades.

At the presidential level, independent voters appear to have driven much of the shift in Harris' favor: Trump now leads that bloc by just two percentage points, down from 24 percentage points in June. Harris has also gained ground among women, who now favor her by six percentage points, after narrowly backing Trump in the earlier Hobby School poll.

Trump's 4.9-point lead in the latest Hobby School poll is similar to the 5.6-point lead he won the state by over Biden in 2020.

Harris' campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon indicated earlier this week that the campaign did not plan to place a large emphasis on Texas, citing the high cost of advertising in the state and saying it would divert resources from other, more competitive states.

“Ultimately, our responsibility as a presidential campaign is to make sure that we have 270 [electoral votes],” O'Malley Dillon said while answering questions from the audience at an event at the Democratic National Convention. “I would like to get to an even higher number, but that's all we care about.”

Even if Democrats lose at the top of the ballot, a close result could give the party's candidates a boost in crucial races for Congress, the Texas Legislature and numerous local offices. In 2018, when O'Rourke nearly ousted Cruz, Democrats gained 12 seats in the state House of Representatives and won two congressional districts, including one in which Allred ousted a longtime Republican member of Congress.

Matthew Choi contributed to this report.

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