TapResearch | Blog

TapResearch is always looking for cutting-edge use cases and partners to leverage our large scale audience engagement network to deliver better insights.  We are excited about expanding our efforts in political and opinion polling.

TX-27 has not been at the forefront of the news. Only few know that this minority-majority district holds special elections on Saturday, June 30^th. TapResearch has teamed up with PredictWise to shed light on the political compass in this district, leveraging TapResearch’s innovative ways to collect data (randomly targeting cell-phone-level ad IDs) to quickly conduct polling at scale, as well as PredictWise’s proven methodology. And, while we find that the district is out of reach for Democratic challenger Eric Holguin, there is some hunger for progressive policies here.

Demographically, the district would be an obvious target for Democrats – 50% of residents are Hispanic in this district, consisting of Corpus Christi and Victoria up to Bastrop County near Austin and Wharton County near Houston. And, the most recent Representative, Republican Blake Farenthold, resigned in disgrace over sexual harassment allegations, on April 6, 2018. But, public polling has been non-existent here, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the organization with the goal to elect Democrats to Congress, has not exactly made this district a priority.

But, as a our new PredictWise/TapResearch poll shows (full data here): The district has hunger for some progressive policies, especially around taxation and gun regulation. First things first: Cook, the standard bearer of Congressional forecasting, has this district as solidly Republican. Our poll agrees: We have Republican candidate Michael Cloud far ahead in the two-party vote-share (65% to 31%). Nothing to see here for Democrats.

But as opposed to other polling, our poll goes deeper than the traditional horse-race, and dissects likely voters in TX-27 on relevant political issues of the day. Take gun regulation for example: Over 50%, a clear majority of Texans residing in this district, support restricting the amount of bullets. And, that number is still above 50% for Republicans, with 71% of Democrats in support (Independents are less inclined to support legislation to restrict the amount of bullets in firearms, coming in at 30% support).

On another issue front, Texans residing in this district are more mixed: immigration. While Dreamers enjoy support among likely voters – 64% of overall voters and a majority (54%) of Republicans support a pathway to citizenship in this district – only a small minority (9%) support an increase in the flow of legal immigration.

On economic issues, however, Texans in this coastal district inhibit a strong desire for more progressive policies: 63% (and 59% of Republicans) support increasing taxes for households making more than $250,000 a year, and over 90% (Democrats and Republicans alike) support tax increases for big corporations. And, a majority of Texans in this district believe that unions are good for them – and likely would have taken issue with the recent Supreme Court ruling on this matter.

Methodology:

Full data here. The insights presented here are a mix of PredictWise baseline data and a fresh set of respondents (N-200 likely voters, collected from 06/12 through 06/28) collected via TapResearch. Then estimates are created of public opinion using the most bleeding edge analytics of modeling and post-stratification (affectionately known as MRP+).