Participants in the Women’s March Dallas event rally outside Dallas City Hall on Oct. 17, 2020. (Photo by Joi Louviere)
A new poll shows that more than half of voters support expanding access to abortion.
Texas voters are in a grumpy mood.
More than half of voters in the state say it’s headed in the wrong direction, in part due to a near-total abortion ban that’s among the most extreme in the nation. That’s according to the results of a new poll of 800 registered voters from Texas Public Opinion Research.
Some 52% of voters in the poll agreed that Texas is on the wrong track, while 41% agreed the state is on the right track. But there’s a split by political party and race on the perception of the state’s direction, according to the poll.
Eight in 10 Democrats — or 81% — think the state is headed in the wrong direction, while 58% of independent voters and 27% of Republicans agreed. Nearly two-thirds of Black voters — 64% — agreed that Texas is headed in the wrong direction, compared to 54% of Latino voters and 49% of white respondents.
Among Dallas voters polled, 55% agreed that the state is headed in the wrong direction. In Houston, that number was 50%.
“What (Texas voters) are less proud about and less happy about was the direction of the state,” said pollster Celinda Lake, who is president of Lake Research Partners and a longtime pollster and political strategist for Democrats.
“The only people that think it’s on the right track are Republicans and even a quarter of them are dissatisfied,” she added.
Texas voters are unhappy for a variety of reasons, including the state’s current elected leaders, abortion and the economy, Lake said. The poll showed that more than half of voters in the state — 52% — agreed that Texas law makes abortion not accessible enough. Some 52% of Dallas voters agreed, while in Houston it was 57%.
While Democrats (89%) and Black voters (73%) overwhelmingly agreed that the state’s abortion law is too restrictive, even 23% of Republicans agreed, according to the poll.
“Abortion (is) an issue, the issue, where Texas voters gave Democrats the biggest advantage and abortion concerns correlating very highly with people thinking the state is going in the wrong direction. People believe overwhelmingly that the state laws are too restrictive,” Lake said.
The state’s abortion ban is also creating a gender gap. Some 57% of women — compared to 46% of men — agreed that abortion is not accessible enough, according to the poll.
“This is driving a pretty big gender gap in Texas politics,” Lake said. “Here you can see the data. Notice that most Texans have a pretty good opinion on this. They’re quite aware of the policies.”
Abortion ranked third among the issues voters want elected officials to focus on. Some 34% of respondents picked border security, followed by affordability and cost of living (29%), abortion (24%) and education and public schools (23%).
Voters also ranked Democrats as significantly better than Republicans in restoring access to abortion, according to the poll, and dinged Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick as one of the least popular statewide elected officials. Patrick pushed for a trigger-law that put the near-total abortion ban in place once Roe v. Wade was struck down in 2022.
TPOR conducted the bilingual survey of 800 registered voters in Texas between Aug. 24 and Aug. 29. It has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points. The results were released on Friday.
