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Poll: Most Texas voters believe business owners shouldn't be allowed to refuse service to LGBT people
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- Title
- Poll: Most Texans oppose refusing to serve LGBT people
- Authors
- Chuck Lindell
- Word count
- 577 words
This survey reminds me of one of those "undercover videos" ABC News did several years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhl9MLno424
Despite being a red state, Texas is actually pretty liberal in the big cities. Beto lost to Cruz in the Senate election by just a couple points on the back of winning most, if not all, of the most populous counties.
Its certainly not perfect. There's been a string of murders of transgendered women recently that Dallas PD is at a loss to solve so far but by and large, in my experience, you're more likely to find Texans who subscribe to "Jesus said love everyone" and old fashioned Southern politeness, at least when going out for dinner.
Again, not perfect. But the Dallas Pride Parade had to be held at Fair Park this year over it's traditional venue, the "gayborhood" down at Oak Lawn due to numbers swelling past the 50k mark. Getting 50k+ people outside in Texas in June is damn impressive and usually only reserved for football games and the State Fair.
texas is basically a swing state now, at least if we're all still considering ohio one. we're still super far out, but the poll this question was a part of is from a quinnipiac poll in which they also released the following presidential election numbers:
which are not exactly numbers you'd expect from an incumbent president in a reliably red state like texas.
Well the main reason I say Texas is still a red state is that it’s basically only the big cities/counties and border cities/counties that will vote Democrat.
Geographically speaking, the vast majority of Texas is still solidly Republican
https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/texas/
https://www.politico.com/election-results/2018/texas/senate/
If we compare the 2016 Presidential election and the 2018 Senate election, Clinton and O’Rourke won basically all the same counties although in terms of pure numbers, Trump beat Clinton by a much larger margin than Cruz beat O’Rourke.
For a Democratic candidate to really swing Texas, they’re going to have to find a way to win those smaller counties.
i don't see why that matters because it's not like land votes. statewide democrats in illinois regularly destroy republicans while only carrying a handful of counties because of urbanization; the same will be true in the future of any democrat which wins texas. clinton's 43% was done while carrying only 27 of the 254 counties in texas, and beto by my count only carried 32 on the way to 48%.
a six point gap in the results honestly isn't that much when you consider that clinton overperformed in texas (romney had carried the state by 16 points in 2012) while underperforming in nearly every other state in the country. clinton's result in 2016 was the best margin-wise (and nearly percentage-wise) for a democrat since the state flipped in 1980; donald's result in texas in 2016 conversely was the worst of any republican candidate in texas since the three way races of 1992 and 1996, and the worst in a two way race since the state flipped consistently republican in 1980 when reagan carried it 55-41.
not really? the year of blue texas is a meme, but it's kinda undeniable that texas is demographically trending favorably for the democrats, mostly on the back of growth in the cities and built up areas swinging toward the democrats. no democrat cares or really should care if they lose a billion small counties 80-20 at this point, because they're more than making those votes up in suburbs and upscale areas and there's a more than viable path to a plurality or majority of the votes through those areas.
Yea but if you contrast that with the Texas governors election, where Greg Abbott won re-election over Lupe Valdez by 12 pts or so, the same year that O'Rourke nearly upsets Cruz, and it doesn't paint the same kind of picture. IIRC, every major state wide office still went to Republicans, although they weren't the landslides they were previously. I won't say that Valdez was much of a competitive choice. She wasn't. But she did win many of the same counties that Beto/Clinton did. There simply aren't enough votes in the Democratic strongholds of the state to win state offices, let alone actually flip the state. Democrats put their chips on O'Rourke, poured millions into his campaign(70 million for Beto versus 33 million for Cruz) and they still lost to one of the most despised Senators in the country.
But we're not there, yet, which is all I'm trying to point out. Is it only a matter of time? Absolutely. The growing Hispanic population, further urbanization(Texas is roughly 85% urban), and large numbers of transplants from places like California(a popular slogan among Republican/Conservative voters here is "Don't California my Texas') means, to me, that within ten years or so, Texas will be solidly purple on the strength of it's most populous counties/cities. But will we see that in 2020? I don't know. I'd like to think so. I love my state but I hate it's politics so I'm only too happy to see Texas moving slowly but surely towards the 21st century.
well, that's presumably because abbott and other statewide republican reps are actually very popular, and cruz is much less so. abbott has like a 60% approval rating while cruz's approval and disapproval are usually about the same (although people who like him tend to really like him while people who don't like him are split between genuinely hating him and just disliking him).
refer to last point, and also cruz was an incumbent seeking reelection (which gives a decreasing but still-extant boost at the polls to incumbent politicians) and is far, far from one of the "most despised senators in the country" where it actually matters, which is in texas itself. he almost always has above-water approval ratings, and he almost always outruns donald's approval in statewide polling. really, it's more remarkable that someone who isn't actually that disliked politically speaking got run to the wire the way he did. there are people with worse approval ratings who do considerably better in elections than cruz did in 2018.
considering that donald did better in ohio than he did in texas, i think we're already there, which was my original point. there's not a reason to think he'll do much better in the state than he did in 2016, because his approval rating hasn't really moved and the demographics and political views of people in the state are almost certainly less favorable to him now than they were in 2016. ohio will also probably be significantly better than it was in 2016 for the democrats, but the fact that "swing state" ohio and "red state" texas are even in the same ballpark results-wise suggests texas is more like a far-end purple state than a bona fide red state.
I spent a lot of my childhood growing up out in the Panhandle. Lubbock, Post, Tahoka. Still have family out there.
The way you put it is interesting, and fairly accurate. I had never seen it that way but now you mention it, it’s pretty accurate.
West Texas can be pretty strict and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my youngest brother didn’t come out as gay until my mother(parents were divorced, I lived with my dad in Dallas) and her half of my siblings moved here to Dallas
Interesting and good to hear! I would love it if Texas was more purple/blue, though I suppose that's kind of a silly statement: "Socialist thinks state slowly moving to the left is a good thing. World is shocked."
I will say I hate the title of this. The double negative really fucked with my tired brain and I thought it said "Most texans oppose serving LGBTQ people" and got heated before reading the article. Though I suppose "Most Texans in favor of serving LGBTQ people" doesn't say the same thing. Also note: I'm not trying to attack you OP because you posted the title of the article. I just think there has to be a way to say it without double-negatives.
I thought about using the opening sentence of the article ("Most Texas voters believe business owners should not be allowed to refuse service to LGBT people"), but even that contains a double negative. It's because of the nature of the question that was posed: it's a question about a negative, and people said "no" to that negative.
Yeah there's no great solution. The question asked was a very specific one.
Paraphrasing that line makes it a lot clearer.
Thanks.
Just a reminder (based off of a quick skim of the article), the poll might be kind of inaccurate as it's only of 1160 people... Not only is it a fairly small sample, but this is also only of people who respond to polls.
All I mean by this is "take the information with a grain of salt."
edit: poll might be inaccurate, it isn't definitely inaccurate
I really wish this myth would die the death it rightly deserves. A poll of 1,000 people can accurately reflect the opinions of the entire U.S. population. (Source One. Source Two.) It can certainly cope with the state of Texas.
Sorry, I should probably rephrase that to be "can be inaccurate".
Just so you (and everyone else) know: it's not the sample size which determines whether a poll is inaccurate, it's the randomness of the selection of that sample, and how well the selected sample reflects the demographics of the wider population. If the sample is properly selected with due regard to randomness and representation, then a sample size of 1,000 is fine. If the sample is not properly selected, then even a sample size of 1,000,000 would not be good enough.
TIL, thank you very much. (And thank you for not getting angry despite my utter density). This makes sense in a way that didn't quite click before (if a sample is completely random, and represents who one says it represents, then it's fair), I guess the main concern there is that most polls aren't completely random, there's typically a bit of selection bias in there (there are some people who don't respond to polls, for instance).
Random offtopic thought: I suppose that a bigger sample size is better for precision, whereas the randomness & representation of it is for accuracy? (for instance, even a single completely random person, would be an accurate poll, but not a precise one. Whereas 1,000,000 people hand picked to give the same answer is really precise but not accurate.)
That comes down to the methodology used by the pollsters, to make the selection as representative as possible. The big reputable pollsters literally stake their reputations on doing this well.
Exactly. The larger the sample size, the lower the margin of error. Instead of saying the results have a margin of error of 3%, meaning the results could lie within a 6-point range, you can reduce that to 2% or 1%. However, you then face the principle of diminishing returns: it costs a lot more time and effort to interview a larger sample, but the reduction in margin of error may not be significant enough to warrant it. For a poll like this, does it matter if the result is 71% ± 3% (68-74%) or 71% ± 2% (69-73%)?
No, I suppose it doesn't, it might matter if it was closer to 50%, or if there were more options.