Texas Politics & Government: Ideas and Institutions

  In the last post, I provided a look at partisan and independents' preferences in the Texas Senate contest among Republican Ken Paxton, Democrat James Talarico, and Libertarian Ted Brown. This post considers the preferences of Texas registered voters according to sex, ethnicity, and age. The chart depicts the crosstabs from the August Texas Poll Report. What are the key takeaways?  There are interesting results in each category. Let's work our way down the chart. First, among the age categories, Paxton is preferred by nearly a majority of Texas registered voters who are 65 years of age or older. Talarico trails, however, by only 4 percent. Also, the elderly are the least likely to be not sure. As the age categories become younger, Talarico's percentage becomes equal to Paxton's percentage among Texas registered voters who are between 30 and 64 years of age. Among the youngest category, Talarico has nearly a majority. Second, among the five ethnic categories, Paxton doe...

  Recently, The Texas Poll Report provided voting preferences of a sample of Texas registered voters. This post relates to the preferences of Texas registered voters in the U.S. Senate race among Republican Ken Paxton, Democrat James Talarico, and Libertarian Ted Brown. Since partisanship places a central role in a person's vote choice, I'll first display a Table depicting the partisan identities of the sample. According to the poll, 42 percent of registered Texans are strong or weak Republicans; 30 percent are strong or weak Democrats, and the remaining 28 percent are pure Independents or Independents who lean toward one of the two major parties. Note that I have placed the "leaners" with the Independents. With this distribution in mind, who do Texas registered voters favor in the  November General Election to replace Republican John Coryn in the U.S. Senate? There are several takeaways from the preferences displayed above: Strong Republicans are less supportive of t...