Well it’s like someone flipped a switch. Massive uptick in political TV ads here in Houston. Mostly Rubio, some Cruz and no Trump as far as I’ve noticed.
Same here in San Antonio. I’ve seen mostly Hillary ads so far, but I don’t watch a lot of TV.
Dallas news poll shows Trump and Cruz tied.
http://www.wfaa.com/news/politics/elections/cruz-trump-tied-in-wfaa-texas-poll/55007805
I have to agree. There are still too many other mooks in the race for any one to match or beat Trump’s numbers in more than one or two states. He comes out of Tuesday the presumptive nominee and I would bet the mortgage on it (but I won’t).
Specific to Cruz and Texas, a statewide poll released today by University of Houston put the Tedster at about 35%, in the lead but well short of the 50% I guess he needs to sweep the delegates. Dead man walkin’, methinks.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say there’s one Super Tuesday state I think Rubio has a very good chance of winning: Virginia.
Why? I’m not sure I can exactly say. Just that from ~30 years of living across the river in Virginia, that’s my sense of things. Part of it is a sense that Virginia Republicans like their conservatism a bit more buttoned-down. Rubio just seems more their sort of guy than either Trump or Cruz.
There are a metric ton of new polls of Texas, “like someone flipped a switch,” as CarnalK said in a related context. And within the limitation that Cruz ≥ Trump ≥ Rubio, you can get them to say what you want.
Trump and Cruz tied, with a big lead over Rubio? SurveyUSA. Cruz with a big lead over both Trump and Rubio, in a tight battle for second? Monmouth. All three tightly bunched? Emerson College. Big spreads between both Cruz and Trump, and Trump and Rubio? Crosswind, Dixie Strategies, YouGov, and University of Houston.
Cruz’ support ranges from 29% to 38%, Trump’s from 20% to 32%, and Rubio’s from 8% to 25%.
So what’s really happening in the Lone Star State? Who the hell knows, other than Cruz will probably win it. Everybody else may think he’s an asshole, but to Texans, he’s their asshole, by God.
Cruz will certainly win Texas (he also has the advantage of early voting starting before Trump’s SC and Nevada blowouts) but he almost certainly won’t be winning by 50%+ to claim all the delegates.It’ll probably just make things worse by convincing Cruz to stay in longer without really closing the gap.
My understanding is that Texas, per district, gives all the delegates for a 50%+ win and allocates them 2:1 to the first and second place winners if no one breaks 50%. So, if I get it right, Cruz winning 49% to 10% is the same as Cruz winning 35% to 33%.
Another new poll of Georgia (same link), this one T-R-C 41-18-15.
Doubt it matters, but the only poll I could find for Arkansas (taken 2/4) has Cruz winning. Fivethirtyeight isn’t even measuring it, though. All it has is the Democratic primary. (And it’s in the bag for Hillary, so I wonder if I should vote in the GOP one. The last I registered, I was a Republican (they asked me first), so…)
New poll shows Trump w/ a pretty commanding lead over Rubio in Virginia w/ Cruz in a distant third. Trump 41, Rubio 27, Cruz 14. Kasich and Carson w/ 7 each.
Rubio is spending heavily in Texas, Georgia and Virginia. I think in Texas he’s just angling for second, since there is a significant delegate difference under the Texas formula from coming in a close 2nd versus a close 3rd. Georgia and Virginia he still trails quite a bit in polls, but 538’s “endorsement-weighted” predictions show him as closer to even with Trump there. How much weight you put on those is up to you (I think in past elections they’d be more useful, but endorsements don’t seem to matter at all to at least a decent segment of the Republican base.)
It’s interesting that Trump hasn’t made any significant ad buys for Super Tuesday at all. One potential Achilles heel of his campaign could be his unwillingness to spend money (since about 2/3rds of his campaign is self-funded.)
It would be awfully satisfying to see Cruz lose Texas, but I don’t think I can make myself go to the Republican primary and vote for Trump. In fact, the thought makes me ill. I’ll probably go to the primary that won’t make me feel like puking on the machine instead.
Tangent: I looked at the primary polling locations in my county and did a quick count. 32% of the Republican locations are in churches, while only 9% of the Democratic ones are. (Half of the latter are Unitarian, by the way.) A tiny sample, of course, but it led me to ponder whether or not the nature of the polling place has an effect on voters, so I did a little googling.
Some interesting hits turned up, including an article by some legal scholars on the Polling Place Priming Effect (PDF) and whether it has constitutional implications for voting in churches. I also found studies from Baylor and Stanford. The upshot is that where people vote can influence how they vote. People voting in a school are slightly more likely to favor funding measures for schools, and people voting in churches tend to vote more conservatively, at least on social issues that churches are known to have a stance on.
How much effect it will have, I don’t know, but having lots of polling places in churches may be a factor in Cruz’s favor.
My casual observation is about 2:1:0 ratio of ads for Rubio:Cruz:Trump here in Houston on the local stations. Hard to blame Trump for that decision though. Every attack he makes gets reported on the 6:00 & 11:00 news, and often makes it to all their news teaser ads. Why buy what you get for free? That’s for dumb low energy losers!
Clearly those fuckers from Monmouth are doing this just to mess with my head.
Tell 'em to give me a few minutes to get off this limb before they saw it off, 'kay? 
Depends on how you define ‘better’ and ‘worse’, I suppose. 
That’s how I read it too. Of course, it’s gonna be a rare district where 10% is good enough for second place despite nobody getting 50%, and only 5 candidates still in the running.
Just for fun, let’s say Cruz gets 40% of the vote in Texas, Trump and Rubio get 25% each, and the other two split the rest. Of the 44 statewide delegates, Cruz would get 40/90 of them, and Trump and Rubio would get 25/90 of them each. That would get Cruz 20 of the 44 statewide delegates, and Trump and Rubio 12 each.
And say 40% statewide is good enough for Cruz to win 32 districts and finish second in 4, with the leftover firsts and seconds split evenly between Trump and Rubio, and Cruz clears 50% in 8 districts. Cruz gets 24 delegates in the 8 CDs he wins outright, 48 in the others where he finishes first, and 4 in the 4 where he finishes second, for 76 delegates from CDs. Trump and Rubio each finish first in 2 districts and second in 12 districts each where Cruz didn’t get 50%. They’d get 16 delegates each. So the total take would be 96 delegates for Cruz, and 28 for each of the other two.
Obviously things could go a little bit either way here: the percentages could be closer statewide and Trump and Rubio could win more districts, while Cruz didn’t get 50% anywhere, or Cruz might be the winner in every CD and clear 50% in more places.
But however it gets sliced, Cruz will get enough of a delegate haul in Texas that he’ll clearly be in second in the delegate hunt when things are tallied up Wednesday morning. Even if Rubio does better than the polls suggest, he’s stuck with Cruz still in the race because Cruz will still be ahead of him in delegates.
(Cruz must be thinking: how come Rubio and Kasich get winner-take-all home states, and I don’t?)
That’s fascinating – thanks! I teach a course on political geography, and this is exactly that, albeit at a smaller scale than geopolitics.
A first place in Texas would still get Cruz more delegates than Kasich or Rubio would get from Ohio or Florida, despite Texas not being WTA.
Not necessarily. Florida has 99 delegates, and Cruz may or may not get more delegates than that by winning Texas. (I guesstimated 96 above, which could be off in either direction.)
More importantly, the Florida winner will gain 99 delegates over his rivals. But since Cruz’ rivals will also pick up delegates in Texas, Cruz will likely gain ~70 delegates more than his rivals do in Texas. So winning Texas gets him less of an advantage in the process than winning Florida will get Rubio, should Rubio win Florida.
Super Tuesday is tomorrow. Any last-minute predictions? I’ve got to go with the consensus that Trump will win either all or almost all of the primaries and caucuses tomorrow, other than Texas which Cruz will win.