A majority of Texas Democrats want former Rep. Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke (D-TX) to drop out of the 2020 presidential primary and run for Senate against Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) instead, according to a Emerson poll released on Tuesday.
The poll found that “about 51% of Democrats said O’Rourke should run for Senate instead of the White House.” Former Vice President Joe Biden leads O’Rourke in Texas, according to the poll that found Biden received 28% to O’Rourke’s 19%. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is in third with 16% and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is in fourth with 14%.
The Emerson poll, which was conducted August 1-3 with a margin of error of +/- 4.9 percentage points for the Democratic sample and +/- 3 percentage points for the general election sample, found Biden and Sanders beating Trump in a hypothetical general election matchup. Both Biden and Sanders received 51% to Trump’s 49% in a hypothetical matchup and were the only two Democrats in the Emerson poll who were ahead of Trump.
O’Rourke, after taking a dive in nearly every state and national poll, has tried to revive his campaign by making the argument to Democrats in early primary states that he is the best Democrat to turn Texas blue in 2020.
O’Rourke has been citing a University of Texas at Tyler (UT Tyler) poll conducted last month that found him leading in Texas among Democrats and beating Trump in a potential general election matchup in Texas by a whopping 12 percentage points.
“Winning those 38 Texas electoral votes allows us not only to defeat Donald Trump in November of 2020, it forever changes the electoral landscape in the United States,” O’Rourke recently told The Dallas Morning News. “This is incredibly important and we uniquely have the ability to follow through.”
But the most recent UT Tyler poll released on Tuesday evening found O’Rourke’s lead against Biden and Trump has decreased. The UT Tyler poll, conducted August 1-4 with a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points, found O’Rourke (23%) still holding a slim lead over Biden (21%) in the primary. O’Rourke led Biden by three percentage points in the last UT Tyler poll.
O’Rourke, who had a 12-point lead over Trump in the last UT Tyler poll, defeats Trump by six percentage points in a hypothetical general election matchup in the most recent UT Tyler poll.
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