Maybe John Cornyn had his finger on the pulse of Texas all along — and perhaps so did Beto … fat lot of good it did him. A new poll from Chism Strategies and Blueprint Polling shows a surprising amount of support for the policy changes that Cornyn negotiated in the US Senate after the massacre in Uvalde. But while Texas voters might have some openness to targeted new laws, they don’t have much openness to the candidate who used Uvalde as a campaign stunt.
First, let’s start with the policies in the Senate compromise that will come up for a vote in the next few days. Texas voters responding to this poll, even Republicans, largely and broadly support expanding background checks, red-flag laws, and raising the minimum age for purchasing firearms to 21. But Republicans draw the line at a ban on so-called “military-style assault rifles”:
Whether or not one agrees with these positions, they seem relatively popular even in Texas. It might be because none of them amount to gun-grabbing in the near term, although the red-flag laws when put into practice might create no small opening for those efforts. It could be that this poll is an outlier, a point to which I’ll return at the end. Assuming it’s accurate, though, we can see why Cornyn felt comfortable leading the Senate negotiations, and likely had his own polling to back up that decision as Blueprint suggests:
With Texas US Senator John Cornyn on center stage in the Congressional response to Uvalde, it is not unlikely that his own internal polling produced similar results to ours on these critical gun safety questions.
So what about this survey? The sample on this poll is small-ish but respectable, with 603 registered voters polled over a three-day period last week. It has a margin of error of ± 3.99%, which isn’t really a factor here for these gaps. The partisan breakdown of the poll is 34.6% Democrat and 45.1% Republican with leaners, and 20.3% independents.
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The crosstabs in this report are difficult to read as they split them by response rather than by the demographic categories themselves, but again the crosstabs don’t matter much on the first three options. When it comes to the assault-weapons ban question, they’re more worth perusing. There is a big gender gap on this response, for instance, with support split 63/36 in favor of women, and opposition heavily tilted toward men, 30/69. The splits are far more consistent among the ethnic demos, however, in what seems a bit of a surprise considering the sharp partisan differences.
With all of this supposed reasonableness on legislative solutions to gun violence in Texas, one would think that Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke would benefit from the shift. Beto certainly tried to put himself front and center on this issue by hijacking a press briefing in Uvalde intended to inform the community of the findings of investigators. How did that effort pay off for O’Rourke? According to this poll … not at all:
I put the two responses together to note that the sample here isn’t entirely hostile to Beto’s push, but apparently is pretty hostile to Beto himself. You’d think that a poll in Texas where only 31% of respondents want the status quo would benefit Beto and hamper Greg Abbott. Instead, Beto barely beats that 31% in his head-to-head against Abbott despite — or likely because of — Beto’s all-in grandstanding in Uvalde and on gun control.
That being said, this looks like the first entry into the publicly released polling sweepstakes for Blueprint and Chism. They don’t show up at FiveThirtyEight’s pollster rating database, nor on RCP’s aggregation in the Texas gubernatorial race. That’s worth at least a grain or two of salt, but it’s worth noting that while the 48/33 split (56/37 with leaners) is an outlier for the Texas race, it’s not all that far off either. Right now the RCP average in the race has Abbott up 47.0/40.3, but we don’t have any polling that includes the Uvalde massacre. Several polls over the past six months have had Abbott up double digits, though, including the Dallas Morning News, the University of Texas, and Quinnipiac.
One other point in favor of the Blueprint/Chism poll: If this was cooked, one would expect a more consistent result, ie, support for new laws to reflect support for Beto, or this gap of support for Abbott reflecting opposition to the Senate package components. The nuance of these results certainly make them a bit more compelling. And if they are accurate, John Cornyn might end up being the wisest politician in Texas … in the short run, anyway.
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