AUSTIN, Texas — Six months ago, hardly anyone treated this fall's governor's race as a real contest. That's no longer true. A wave of late-summer polling shows Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa cutting into Gov. Greg Abbott's advantage.
The shift shows up most clearly in a single pollster's own tracking. A Texas A&M Bush School survey conducted with ReconMR had Abbott up by six points in early June. By late July, the same operation found the race down to a single point, 46% to 45%, with Democrats slightly underrepresented in the sample relative to Republicans. A Fox News survey fielded almost the identical week — late July, more than 1,000 registered voters — landed in nearly the same spot: Abbott ahead by a single point, 50% to 49%, a margin The Texan's roundup of major surveys noted sat well inside that poll's error range.
