In other states, ever since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June, Democrats have been performing better than expected — in the rejection of an anti-abortion rights ballot measure in Kansas and in special congressional elections in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York. President Joe Biden’s public approval ratings have ticked up. But if the political winds of a post-Roe summer were lifting Democrats elsewhere, they do not appear to be blowing into Texas.

In a survey released in mid-September by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler, O’Rourke was running 9 percentage points behind Abbott in the race for governor. A University of Texas/Texas Project poll put the margin at 5 points. A few days after the church service, O’Rourke’s deficit registered in a Quinnipiac University poll at 7 points.

Those aren’t encouraging numbers for O’Rourke. And the top lines aren’t even the worst of it. In their lone debate, in an empty studio on Friday night, O’Rourke cast Abbott as “extreme” on abortion rights and as a “failure” on immigration and in his response to the school shooting in Uvalde in May. But when pollsters asked voters recently what mattered to them most, it was as though Texas hadn’t changed at all. Immigration and border security — not abortion or gun violence — ranked first. And on immigration, Texans trusted Abbott over O’Rourke by double-digit margins.

Abbott’s controversial busing of migrants out of state? A majority of Texas voters support it.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has an 11-point lead over former U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist in Florida’s race for governor, according to a new poll released Wednesday.

The survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy shows the Republican DeSantis with 52% of the vote compared with Democratic candidate Crist’s 41%. Only about 6% remain undecided, meaning voters have largely made up their minds.

It comes a week before Crist and DeSantis are scheduled to meet in their only debate in Fort Pierce on Oct. 12.

DeSantis leads throughout the state, with the exception of the Democratic stronghold of South Florida, said Brad Coker, director of Mason-Dixon.

OPEC and its allies, including Russia, are widely expected to approve a sizable cut in oil production in order to bolster prices when officials meet in Vienna on Wednesday.

Among those attending the meeting is Russia’s deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, who has played a key role in fostering cooperation with the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. The presence of Mr. Novak, who is subject to U.S. sanctions, could come as an embarrassment to European officials when their citizens face what could be a tough winter because of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Analysts say a very large cut on the order of two million barrels a day, or about 2 percent of world supplies, could be on the table.

The gathering of the group, known as OPEC Plus, is the first to be held in person since the early days of the pandemic. That signals an intention to make a strong statement to energy markets about the group’s cohesion during the fighting in Ukraine and its willingness to act quickly to defend prices, analysts say.

The entire concept of polling depends on having a set population from which one can take a random sample and get a generally representative snapshot. Pre-election polls have no existing population—the election hasn’t happened yet, and voting isn’t compulsory in the U.S., so we simply don’t have a population of who voted until all the polls have closed on Election Day.

We can’t remedy that. The population of voters will never exist prior to the election. Expecting polls to be able to consistently, accurately predict an election is asking more than is statistically and theoretically possible. Yes, we (pollsters) have a lot of information from past elections to help figure it out. But it’s gotten harder to poll a representative sample of the entire American adult population over the last few decades. Just in the past couple of election cycles, we have seen candidates activate people who typically don’t vote, so is it really surprising that the error rates of horse-race polls have increased?

Still, polls are the best way we have to gauge public opinion around elections. That’s a valuable tool. So the way pollsters have worked around this problem is to dip our toes into the prediction game by identifying “likely voters” in surveys—those people we think will turn out to vote. Let’s be clear though: “Likely voters” are only educated guesses.

Most public pollsters don’t really say how they construct “likely-voter” models, but in general, there are three methods used to estimate who among registered voters is most likely to turn out: use information from voter-registration files about who has turned out to vote in the past; ask voters one or more questions about whether they plan to vote, their voting history, or their enthusiasm about voting; or create models of what the expected electorate should look like and weight the data to that model.

President Joe Biden, during a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, reiterated on Tuesday the United States’ support for Ukraine amid Russia’s attempted annexation of its territory.

“President Biden also affirmed the continued readiness of the United States to impose severe costs on any individual, entity, or country that provides support to Russia’s purported annexation,” the White House said in a readout of the call, which Vice President Kamala Harris also participated in.

The phone call between the leaders comes just a few days after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest escalation of the war in Ukraine, when he announced four Ukrainian provinces would become Russian territory based on government-held sham referendums. Biden strongly condemned Putin’s move on Friday, just hours after the announcement, while also unveiling new sanctions on individuals and entities both inside and outside of Russia who provide political or economic support to the annexation attempt.

The Treasury, State and Commerce departments on Friday unleashed a raft of new sanctions to block the American assets of top Russian officials following Putin’s announcement. The measures join the slew of sanctions that the U.S. has already levied on Russia since it invaded Ukraine in an attempt to stymie its funding of the war.

Months before news broke alleging that Herschel Walker paid for an abortion, top Republicans in the state — including those advising his team — warned him that the story could torpedo his campaign.

Four people with knowledge of those preliminary discussions said that the abortion issue was well known within the state, even before reporters began inquiring about it.

It was brought to the attention of those working on Walker’s behalf, in part as a means of discouraging him from running. His team downplayed the potential disruption it would cause. But, according to one of those people, they did not outright deny it.

“It was, ‘Eh, it’s not going to come out, you’re being hyperbolic,’” said one top Georgia GOP operative, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “The reaction was not, ‘They’re not going to say that because it never happened.’ It was like everything else, ‘Eh, people aren’t going to find out.’”

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/04/walker-campaign-abortion-midterm-election-00060312

Liz Truss’s government is in chaos after the chancellor refused to confirm he would bring forward his budget to calm the markets and the home secretary accused fellow MPs of a coup against the prime minister.

Cabinet discipline also appeared to have broken down on Tuesday, as two ministers, Robert Buckland and Penny Mordaunt, suggested they did not back the idea of cutting benefits – an idea floated by those close to No 10.

Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng embarked on a round of media interviews intended to convey a message that they were getting a grip after the damaging 45p U-turn. However, they caused more confusion as both said their medium-term fiscal plan would still happen on 23 November, despite government sources having briefed that it would be brought forward to try to reassure the markets.

Adding to the sense of open warfare in the party, Suella Braverman, the home secretary, accused Tory MPs of having “staged a coup and undermined the PM in an unprofessional way” to force the reversal of the abolition of the 45p rate.