Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

In previous posts, I have used the early vote in the 15 largest counties to predict voter turnout in the election. Using the data from the same early vote this time (499,012) and assuming that this is approximately 26.39 percent of the total vote, then I predict that turnout when voting is completed on November 3, 2015 will be 1,890,913 +/-3 percent, which means between 1,834,185 and 1,947,640 votes. That would calculate as a turnout of between 13.11 and 13.92 percent of registered voters. That seems high, but I'll stick with that prediction.

Josh Blank provided the crosstabs for PID7 from the Texas Lyceum 2015 poll, and I think that the results are very interesting. Eighty percent of the poll respondents (1000 sample size, sampling error of +/- 3.1%) claimed to be registered to vote, but the difference between the party identification of registered voters in Texas from the UT/Texas Tribune Poll--shown below--are dramatic as are the crosstabs--scroll down.

Recently, the June 2015 UT/Texas Poll indicated that a plurality of registered voters in Texas support same-sex marriage. Forty-four percent support same-sex marriage, and 41 percent oppose same-sex marriage. An identical question was posed to adult Texans in the Texas Lyceum poll conducted in September 2015. Has support increased among registered voters since June? Are Texans who are not registered to vote more or less supportive of same-sex marriage. Both questions can be answered with the chart that I created from the Texas Lyceum Poll data. There has been a three percent increase in support for same-sex marriage among registered voters (this is within the sampling error margin of +/- 3 percent). Secondly, adult Texans who are not registered to vote are more likely to support same-sex marriage (54 percent) than registered voters.

In the 2015 Texas Lyceum Poll, there is a crosstab between "party ID" and "Interest in Politics." The results are interesting. Republicans, both strong and weak Republicans, are much more interested in politics than strong and weak Democrats. The chart reflects the differences:

In the Texas Lyceum Poll that was released on September 30, 2015, the executive summary provides party identification for the 1,000 Texas adults who were interviewed for the poll. The sampling error is +/- 3.1 percent. The advantage over the UT/Texas Tribune Poll is that this poll reflects the party identification of all Texas adults while the UT/Texas Tribune Poll only shows the party identification of registered voters. Here are the results: