The race for U.S. Senate between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke has narrowed, with the Republican incumbent leading the El Paso Democrat by only 5 points, according to a new University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

Released Monday morning, the survey of 1,200 registered voters shows 41 percent backing Cruz, 36 percent supporting O'Rourke and 2 percent favoring Libertarian Neal Dikeman. The poll was conducted June 8-17 and had a margin of error of 2.83 points.

For races lower on the ballot, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had a 6-point lead over Democrat Mike Collier, and Attorney General Ken Paxton led Democrat Justin Nelson by a single point, according to the poll.

Among top GOP officeholders, only Gov. Greg Abbott, who had high favorability ratings in the poll, had a comfortable double-digit lead — 12 points over Democrat Lupe Valdez, a former Dallas County sheriff.

"Abbott is governor at a time when the economy is still chugging along, there's been no major scandals or real controversies surrounding his administration, and there's no real hot-button issue that would divide support for him," said Daron Shaw, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the poll. "He ends up being kind of a top-end Republican candidate right now. There's no real negatives for him."

The U.S. Senate race appears to have tightened in recent weeks.

A Quinnipiac University survey conducted May 23-29 gave Cruz a wider, 11-point lead, with 50 percent to O'Rourke's 39 percent. In that survey, Cruz enjoyed strong backing from men and white voters, while he and O'Rourke were effectively tied among women and Hispanics. The poll of 961 registered voters had a margin of error of 3.8 points.

Down-ballot effect

In the governor’s race, the new UT/Texas Tribune poll shows Abbott coasting against Valdez, with 44 percent to her 32 percent. But the double-digit margin is lower than in the Quinnipiac poll, which had Abbott leading Valdez by nearly 20 points — 53 percent to 34 percent.

The governor and U.S. Senate races will top the Texas ballot in November, and with Texans' propensity for casting straight-ticket votes, that means whichever party is leading at the top could carry its candidates lower on the ballot, Shaw said.

But for that “coattails effect” to carry the election for the Democrats, voters would need to be enthused enough about the top two candidates to turn out in force.

Shaw said that because much of O’Rourke’s support stems from his personality, and not necessarily his policies, he’s unsure of the strength of his coattails.

“I’m not sure how that plays down ballot,” he said. “You know, not all of the other candidates down ballot are Cruz, and not all of the other Democrats are Beto. I’m not sure how that translates.”

Paxton, who was first elected attorney general in 2014 and is fighting felony indictments on charges of securities fraud, leads his Democratic opponent with 32 percent to Nelson’s 31 percent, while the Libertarian in the race — Michael Ray Harris — came in at 6 percent. More than a quarter of voters in the poll were undecided, and 4 percent said they planned to vote for someone else.

In the race for lieutenant governor, Patrick led Collier — the Democrat who ran for state comptroller in 2014 — 37 percent to 31 percent. Libertarian Kerry McKennon had support from 4 percent of Texas voters, while nearly 30 percent hadn’t made up their minds or planned to support someone else.

Shaw said the Democrats need an issue or policy to rally around if they want even one of their statewide candidates to win in November. It could be something like the 2006 blowback over the Iraq war, which cost the GOP both houses in Congress, or the Democrats’ massive losses over frustrations with Obamacare.

But as of right now, Shaw said, nothing — not even the unpopular zero-tolerance policy that separated immigrants parents from their children at the border — has materialized as a standout issue that could create a blue “wave” capable of washing Republicans out of office.

While most Texas voters opposed that Trump administration policy, according to another UT/Texas Tribune poll, Democrats would need to make the issue one part of a wider message — that the election is a referendum on the Trump presidency as a whole — in order to win, Shaw said.

“Trump’s kind of a mixed bag in Texas. Republicans don’t love him, but they’ll rally around him,” Shaw said. “Democrats don’t like him at all, but it’s not clear to me if that makes a huge difference in Texas the way it might elsewhere.”

“When people are looking at these ‘wave elections,’” he said, “they’re almost always driven by some kind of real policy frustration.”