WASHINGTON — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has kept conservative primary challengers at bay by tacking hard right on abortion, the border, mask and vaccine mandates, guns and critical race theory.
But the strategy has come at a high price.
His overall support is plunging, potentially leaving him vulnerable to the likes of actor Matthew McConaughey and former congressman Beto O’Rourke, according to a new poll from The Dallas Morning News and University of Texas at Tyler.
A whopping 54% of Texans surveyed think the state is on the wrong track. Just 45% approve of the governor’s job performance.
The poll on state and political issues was conducted Sept. 7-14. It surveyed 1,148 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.
In the past two months, McConaughey has gone from slightly behind to 9 percentage points ahead of Abbott in a hypothetical match-up, and O’Rourke has cut the governor’s lead from 12 points to five.
As the state death toll from COVID-19 tops 60,000, Texans are unhappy about many things.
The causes Abbott has championed to endear himself to conservatives and survive the primary have also hardened opposition against him.
“So many issues are on the table,” said pollster Mark Owens, a political scientist at UT-Tyler. “The collective attention of what the state is doing and leading the country on is not even confined to just one message.”
Abbott’s far-ranging 2021 agenda includes a legally provocative ban on abortions as early as six weeks, a dream come true for social conservatives, and a $1 billion commitment of state funds for border wall construction, sure to please Donald Trump and his followers.
The governor’s political fortunes are entwined with these and other equally divisive initiatives.
Of poll respondents who support the right to carry a gun without a permit, or Abbott’s ban on mask mandates, two-thirds think Texas is on the right track. It’s 3-in-5 among those who support Abbott’s ban on vaccine mandates, or the abortion ban.
On the other side, nearly everyone (83%) who disapproves of Abbott’s job performance thinks Texas is on the wrong track. Of Texans who oppose spending state revenue on a border wall, 74% say Texas is on the wrong track.
Even 29% of Abbott supporters are in that camp.
“I don’t know where the bottom is on this,” said Owens.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic began to grip the country in March 2020, Abbott’s approval rating was 59%. It’s been dropping since January and is now at a rock-bottom 45%.
The hard-right agenda has alienated a critical swing bloc. Abbott’s approval among independents has dropped from 53% early last year to just 30% in the new poll — a perilous low.
“The man is a complete idiot. He’s not listening to scientific results [and] he’s initiated his own little war,” said Walter Story, 51, an independent and former paramedic from Sulphur Springs east of Dallas.
Two-thirds of Texas Republicans surveyed support Abbott’s ban on mask mandates by local officials in Dallas and other counties and 76% support his efforts at the border — deploying National Guard and other measures.
But Democrats and independents broadly disapprove of those steps.
“He’s made poor decisions for the state, including diverting money to a wall we do not need that could go to education or food for the hungry. … The man just needs to be out of there,” Story said.
Ricardo Villareal, a delivery man from Houston, 54, and an independent, is likewise dismayed by Abbott’s bans on mask and vaccine mandates.
The bans violate common sense and science, he said, even if they make conservatives happy.
“No matter how people should feel about the Constitution, it’s not a suicide pact. You have to let people protect themselves,” he said.
Trump’s narrow 5.6-point win in Texas last fall — and Sen. Ted Cruz’s even closer race in 2018 against O’Rourke, a three-term Democratic congressman from El Paso — showed how crucial appeal to independents is.
In July, the governor led O’Rourke by 12 points, 45-33.
O’Rourke has yet to reveal whether he’ll jump into the governor’s race. Without making any overt moves, he’s closed the gap to 42-37 in two months. But at the moment, he’s more polarizing than Abbott or Cruz.
“I wouldn’t vote for him if he was the last person on Earth. I don’t like him, and I don’t think he knows what he’s doing,” said respondent Rose Miller, 74, an Abbott supporter and retired secretary from Hempstead.
Abbott has been reminding would-be donors about the $80 million O’Rourke raised when he nearly ousted Cruz.
As for McConaughey, the Oscar-winning actor who owns a 10,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Austin has also been toying with a run for governor. He’s never run for office but polls have shown for months that he’s a threat, at least as a hypothetical candidate.
In The News’ April poll, he led Abbott 45-33. Abbott pulled into a statistically insignificant lead by July, topping his fellow Longhorn 39-38.
McConaughey is back on top, 44-35.
While many of Abbott’s backers are drawn by a sense that he shares their values, McConaughey’s fans more typically cite his honesty. And not everyone’s a fan.
“He may be a Texas native, but I feel like he has not been a participant in Texas political matters,” said retired railroad worker Bill Neill, 75, a Democrat from Conroe who would rather elect O’Rourke. “Anything to get rid of Greg Abbott and the neo-Nazi hordes.”
Before Abbott faces either, or some other Democrat, he’ll have to make it through the primary.
Former Sen. Don Huffines and former Texas GOP chair Allen West, a one-term Florida congressman, have both positioned themselves as more reliable conservatives than Abbott. So far, they haven’t gained much traction.
In head-to-head matches, Abbott leads Huffines 70-15 and he tops West 65-20.
“If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” said Abbott supporter David Justman, 46, who lives in Van, near Tyler in East Texas.
Conservative agenda
The poll finds that some of Texas Republicans’ crowning legislative achievements in recent months fly in the face of public opinion: banning abortions as early as six weeks, providing a right to carry a concealed handgun without a permit, and banning so-called critical race theory from classrooms.
On abortion rights, Texans are almost evenly split on whether they want the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade and allow Senate Bill 8 to stand. Roe has allowed abortion during the early months of pregnancy since 1973.
SB 8 bans abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which could be as early as two weeks after a woman misses her period. And in a novel approach intended to make it hard to derail the law in court, it outsources enforcement to anyone who wants to file a lawsuit.
Support for overturning Roe and upholding SB 8 is at 48%, compared to 50% on the other side of the question.
As for constitutional carry — allowing the carrying of a handgun without a permit — only 34% of Texans support it.
The banning of critical race theory from classrooms is also deeply unpopular: 56% of Texans agree that “K-12 teachers should be permitted to discuss how historical examples of discrimination in our laws apply to inequalities today.” Just 27% say they should not.
That’s a concise definition of a longstanding academic approach that conservatives have demonized in recent years.
Like the law Abbott signed June 15, the poll question does not invoke the term critical race theory, though.
That law, enacted in the final hours of the regular session of the Legislature, bars teaching that anyone is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, either consciously or unconsciously.
And it says that if teachers discuss current events or controversies, they can’t give “deference to any one perspective” — a provision that could force educators to play down white supremacy, or offer a sympathetic portrayal of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 or of police who attack peaceful protesters.
Support for teaching critical race theory has actually risen since Abbott signed that law, from 51% in late June to 56% — perhaps because without Trump in office, the near-daily scaremongering has faded.
On Friday, Abbott signed a new critical race theory law intended to beef up the previous law.
The newer version develops a civics training program for teachers, prohibits students from getting school credit for advocacy, and casts slavery and racism as “deviations” from the founding principles of the United States.
As with many such topics, the partisan split is wide. Far more Republicans would ban abortion and allow concealed handguns without a permit.
“They’re from the U.S. Constitution,” said Republican poll respondent Shane Korinek, 52, a Garland police officer who lives in Sachse. “That’s why I support them.”
CORRECTION, 11:30 a.m.: An earlier version of this story said Gov. Greg Abbott’s approval rating in this poll is 41%. It is 45%.
Methodology
The Dallas Morning News/UT-Tyler Poll is a statewide random sample of 1,148 registered voters conducted Sept. 7-14. The mixed-mode sample includes 292 registered voters surveyed over the phone by the University of Texas-Tyler with support from ReconMR and 857 registered voters randomly selected from Dynata’s panel of online respondents. The margin of error is +/- 2.9 percentage points, and the more conservative margin of sampling error that includes design effects from this poll is +/- 3.7 percentage points for a 95% confidence interval. The online and phone surveys were conducted in English and Spanish. Using information from the 2020 Current Population Survey and the Texas Secretary of State, the sample’s gender, age, race/ethnicity, education, metropolitan density and vote choice were matched to the population of registered voters in Texas.
