The Polling Alley Podcast
The Polling Alley Recap: The Outlook in Texas
In this episode, the team discusses upcoming Texas Senate primaries, voter sentiment towards Economic Fairness, and results from our latest Overton Inights poll.
Poll Analyst
olivia@overtoninsights.com
Mark’s prediction held. Talarico defeated Jasmine Crockett by nearly double digits in the Texas Senate Democratic primary, despite trailing in the overwhelming majority of public polls. Cunningham had flagged the race as a likely Talarico win weeks earlier, pointing to what he called the signal buried in higher-quality polls from Emerson and others.
"It's not [that] all polls are good," Cunningham said. "When you see these legitimate polls that have shown a history of being right, I would follow those." - Mark Cunningham
Melendez offered the methodological explanation for why so many later polls missed: undecideds were never pushed to choose. In his analysis, late-deciders and soft undecideds reliably drift toward the more moderate or better-known candidate, in these cases Talarico and Cornyn. When he reviewed each poll’s undecided numbers, he said, the outcome seemed predictable.
Both analysts also noted that this same dynamic — undecideds being absorbed by the more establishment candidate — explained John Cornyn’s surprising finish in the Republican primary leading Ken Paxton, despite not a single poll projecting it. The GOP race will still head into a runoff.
A new James Madison Institute poll shows Byron Donalds up 18 points in the Republican primary, with social media-driven candidate James Fishback drawing just 3% despite significant online attention. Cunningham noted the Fishback result as a clean illustration of social media’s limited predictive value for actual votes.
In the general election matchup, Democrat David Jolly — a former Republican congressman running on a moderate platform — trails Donalds by only two to five points, with roughly 17% of voters undecided. Cunningham flagged this as a potential concern for Republicans. Melendez, applying the same undecided logic from earlier, argued Donalds’ actual margin is likely wider once those voters are forced to choose along partisan lines. Both agreed the picture changes entirely if Casey DeSantis enters the race.
Several organizations rushed polls into the field in the days following Trump’s military actions in Iran, and the results showed surprising consistency despite different question framings — all within roughly nine points of each other. Cunningham called the consistency itself notable given the compressed timeline.
Melendez urged caution in how the data is interpreted. “I would view all of this in a much more emotional sense,” he said, arguing the polls capture an immediate gut reaction rather than a considered policy position. He noted the numbers could look entirely different a week later, particularly if what some expect to be a short engagement turns into a prolonged conflict.
Both Michael and Mark observed that the favorability numbers closely mirror Trump’s overall approval rating, suggesting the results reflect existing partisan priors more than any new opinion formation.
An article from The Argument examined panel data showing a meaningful share of 2024 Trump voters no longer self-reporting as having voted for Trump, and vice versa for Harris voters. Melendez challenged the assumption that respondents told the truth when first surveyed in 2024. But beyond the methodology, the article surfaced a broader dynamic: people want to be on the winning side. While not present in this data, that tendency has been observed by pollsters while tracking other elections.
Cunningham added the quiet Trump voter phenomenon — people who vote for Trump but don’t disclose it to their social circle — may be a contributing factor to the shifting self-reports. The conversation led to a broader argument Melendez has made consistently: asking voters who they’re planning to vote for is a worse predictor of election outcomes than asking who they think will win or who their neighbors are voting for. He pointed to 2016 as evidence, when neighborhood-level questions were flagging Trump momentum long before the final results. Cunningham agreed, calling for polls to routinely include both questions to generate better trend data over time.
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