Donald Trump’s Chances of Losing Texas, According to Odds, Polls

Former President Donald Trump is on track to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in Texas next month, according to a range of recent polls, which put the Republican presidential nominee ahead by between 4 and 12 percentage points.

The surveys undermine the claims by some Democrats that Texas, traditionally a GOP stronghold, could be in play. Former gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke, in a recent interview, described it as “the sleeper battleground state.”

Recent national surveys suggest the 2024 presidential election remains on a knife edge. A recent model produced by polling analytics website FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 51 percent chance of victory versus 49 percent for Harris. Trump comfortably won Texas in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and losing the state and its 40 electoral college votes would be a potentially terminal blow to his campaign.

An Emerson College poll published on Wednesday of 815 likely Texan voters conducted between October 18 and 21 gave Trump a 7-point lead with 53 percent of the vote against 46 percent. This was a substantial improvement for the former president on a previous Emerson College poll conducted on September 6, which gave him a 4-point lead with 50 percent to Harris’ 46 percent. The latest survey had a 3.2-point margin of error.

The latest FiveThirtyEight analysis of Texas polling, published on October 22 before the Emerson College survey was released, gave Trump an average lead in the state of 6.8 points with 50.9 percent of the vote against 44.1 percent for Harris.

An ActiVote survey of 400 likely voters in Texas, which took place between September 26 and October 16, gave Trump a 12-point lead in the state with 56 percent of the vote against Harris’ 44 percent. The poll had an average expected error of 4.9 percent.

Morning Consult polled 2,048 likely Texan voters between October 6 and 15 and found Trump had a four-point lead with 50 percent of the vote against Harris’ 46 percent.

A poll by YouGov for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas between October 2 and 10 of 1,091 likely voters in Texas gave Trump a 5-point lead with 51 percent of the vote against 46 percent for Harris, with a 2.97-point margin of error.

As of 9 a.m. ET on Wednesday, bookmakers Bet365 and William Hill were both offering odds of 1/20 (95.2 percent) on Trump winning Texas in November, against 10/1 (9.1 percent) for Harris.

Newsweek reached out to the Trump and Harris campaigns via email for comment on Wednesday outside of regular office hours.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is also facing a reelection battle in November, with Democrats pouring resources into the contest in the hope of unseating the Republican incumbent. Recent polling has given Cruz a lead of between one and seven points over Representative Colin Allred, his Democratic challenger.

According to figures released by their respective campaigns, Allred raised $30.3 million for his Senate campaign in the third quarter of 2024, ahead of Cruz, who received around $21 million split across three separate accounts.