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RandySF

(57,604 posts)
Mon Sep 28, 2020, 09:39 PM Sep 2020

TX-25: Can Julie Oliver Beat Roger Williams?

Trends in the Texas suburbs—especially along I-35, which the Twenty-fifth crosses in both Austin and near DFW—are good for Democrats. Three of the four Texas counties that added the most new voters since 2018—Hays, Williamson, and Travis—fall partially within the district. There are no nonpartisan polls of the race, but internal polling that the Oliver campaign released in mid-September has the challenger down by only two points, within the margin of error, which tracks with a similar poll paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in July.

If there’s any sort of blue wave in Texas, and if Joe Biden finds himself with coattails (the polling gurus at FiveThirtyEight currently give him roughly a one-in-three chance of winning here), then it’ll be because those new voters, who live exactly where Oliver needs them to be, were activated in the race. If she defeats Williams, the story of the 2020 election in Texas will be a story about the suburbs along I-35 completing the transition we began to see in 2018: from a GOP stronghold to a fully purple part of the state that can be contested by both parties.

Even if there’s a dramatic realignment of the Texas suburbs and Oliver improves on her 2018 showing by a big margin, she still might lose by several points. She faces a heck of a gap for a challenger to make up against a well-funded incumbent in a presidential year, when incumbents who share a party with the president tend to do better than they do in midterms. Williams’s internal polling, which his campaign released in early September, draws a stark contrast with Oliver’s—it shows the Republican with a twelve-point advantage.

The Cook Political Report, which tracks congressional races, has this as “likely R,” a race that it doesn’t consider competitive at the moment but that has potential to end up that way. If Oliver wins, it means Democrats have probably picked up a lot of the seats they had targeted across the state. But a district that was drawn ten years ago to be one Republicans can win by 25 points is the kind where it’s a lot easier for a Democrat to claim a moral victory than an electoral one.




https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/julie-oliver-roger-williams-race/

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