How accurate were Texas polls for the midterm elections? Here's what our report card shows

Political polls are not meant to be exact predictions of future election results, and they rarely are. But they were especially accurate this year, with the 2022 Texas election results hewing closely to public polling in the weeks leading up to the midterms. There were nine nonpartisan, public polling groups that published pre-election surveys of likely voters in the two months leading up to Election Day, since Sept. 1. Of those, six were within the error margins of the correct results. Two of the three that missed were within 1.5 percentage points of their margins, and they were both from September.

Polls are less predictive the further they are from the date an election is held, as voters can change their minds or motivation. Only an October poll from UT-Tyler/The Dallas Morning News largely missed the mark, predicting a 6-percentage-point Abbott victory — off by about 5 points. Polling has gotten harder over time, as pollsters traditionally relied on live-callers who reached voters through landline phones. Most people don’t have landlines any more, and those who do are not representative of the population as a whole, so pollsters have been forced to include text messages, online surveys and other methods to collect responses. “There’s no doubt that changing technology has been a huge challenge for pollsters,” said Renee Cross, the executive director of the Hobby School of Public Affairs, which puts out the poll. For instance, the University of Houston poll had to shift its focus away from live callers and seek help from a research firm called YouGov that collects online survey responses. “I’m sure there’s going to come a time when even that has to shift," Cross said. "So I would say technological changes and how we as people communicate is going to be a constant readjustment." Skepticism about political polling has grown since the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump defied polling expectations in his win over Hillary Clinton. Even in 2020, the average of opinion polls in Texas predicted that Trump would best Joe Biden in their presidential race by about 1 percentage point, when in reality Trump won by about 5.5 points.