Donald Trump speaks at Gilley’s in Dallas, Texas. (Getty)
A new poll shows that Donald Trump is only six points ahead of Hillary Clinton in Texas.
The survey, conducted by Public Policy Polling and released on August 16th, shows Donald Trump winning in Texas by six percentage points, 44 percent to 38 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson captured six percent of the vote, while Jill Stein won two percent. In a head-to-head match up, Trump leads Clinton by the same margin, 50 percent to 44 percent.
This is a surprisingly tight race for Texas, one of the most Republican states in the country where Mitt Romney won by a margin of nearly 16 percent. In a September 2012 poll, Romney was beating Obama by 19 points.
Trump’s lead over Clinton is down from another recent Texas poll that had him up by seven points.
The Public Policy Polling survey shows that Donald Trump is struggling to gain young voters, as Hillary Clinton is winning in the state among those under the age of 65 by a margin of four percentage points. Among voters under the age of 45, Clinton is beating Trump 60 percent to 35 percent. And among non-white voters in Texas, Clinton is ahead of Trump 73 percent to 21 percent.
Not all the polls look so bad for Trump, though, as another August poll from Texas had him up by 11 points.
Public Policy Polling also found that Trump’s fans are increasingly believing his theory that the election will be rigged; 71 percent of Trump supporters said that if Hillary Clinton wins in November, it will be because she stole the election.
In spite of these lagging poll numbers in red states, the prospect of Trump losing Texas is still a bit of a stretch. But FiveThirtyEight forecasts that Hillary Clinton has nearly a 25 percent chance of turning the state blue in November.
Based on recent polling, it’s more likely that Hillary Clinton could win red states like Arizona and Georgia; Clinton has begun to catch up on Trump and even overtake him in many polls from those states.
