A poll shows Democrat Beto O’Rourke within 2 percentage points of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

— Republican Party of Texas on July 14, 2018, in a fundraising email blast

A recent Republican pitch opened: “The Democrats are unhinged.”

The email blast soliciting donations to the Republican Party of Texas also quoted the party’s Stephen Wong saying that a new poll shows Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, running very close behind Republican Sen. Ted Cruz — the Houston lawyer who won the seat in 2012 by nearly 16 percentage points.

Wong wrote: “You’ve probably seen how” ecstatic “the far-left has been the last 24 hours. First there was a poll showing Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke within 2 pts(!) of Senator Cruz.” Then, Wong said, O’Rourke reported raising more money than Cruz in the year’s second quarter.

From April through June 2018, O’Rourke’s campaign again outraised Cruz’s effort, but did a recent poll show O’Rourke closely trailing Cruz?

To our inquiry, Kyle Whatley, the party’s executive director, pointed out a July 10 post on the Politicus website quoting Markos Moulitsas, founder of the liberal Daily Kos blog, saying in a tweet that data collected by Civiqs, a division of the Moulitsas-founded Kos Media, shows that O’Rourke “now trails Ted Cruz by only 2” percentage points, “48-46.”

When Civiqs launched an online “dashboard” in March spotlighting its polls, Moulitsas wrote: “Daily Kos is a partisan outfit. Civiqs has its own mission, and that is to represent the state of public opinion accurately.”

In July, Moulitsas showcased the Cruz-O’Rourke results in an illustration that he tweeted.

The illustration says registered voters responded to this question: “If the election for U.S. senator from Texas were held today, and the choices were Ted Cruz and Beto O’Rourke who would you vote for?” In reply, 48 percent said Cruz, 46 percent replied O’Rourke and the remaining 6 percent split between supporting someone else or being unsure, the illustration says.

According to the illustration, the result was based on 12,379 responses gathered from Feb. 16, 2017-July 4, 2018--or more than 17 months.

To our inquiry, the director of Civiqs, Drew Linzer, told us the poll showing O’Rourke just behind Cruz, available to Civiqs subscribers, was accurately portrayed by Moulitsas.

By email, Linzer further said the poll, not commissioned or sponsored by a client, relied on responses since February 2017 from respondents engaged over the web as volunteers for Civiqs survey panels who self-identified as Texas residents and registered voters.

Civiqs says in the methodology section of its website that it maintains a growing list of Americans who have agreed to take polls at civiqs.com. Panelists reside in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and match the contours of the United States along key geographic, demographic and ideological lines,” Civiqs says.

We asked Linzer, a former political scientist at Emory University, to talk about relying on responses collected over more than 17 months. “The lengthy timeframe,’Linzer replied, “enables Civiqs to perform long-term daily tracking in a sustainable, methodologically rigorous manner.” Civiqs, he said, applies “specialized trendline fitting statistical models” to ensure the results match current public opinion.

Linzer said by phone that for the Texas poll, Civiqs emailed 40 to 50 respondents a day, asking each one about their Texas residence and registered voter status and stance on the Senate candidates, with those results over time feeding the trend line.

As of July 4, the latest date shown on the trend line posted by Moulitsas, “the most recent day’s worth of data has the greatest impact on the result,” Linzer said, though responses from previous days mattered a lot, too, he said. Linzer said responses gathered in 2017 also contributed to the result, but only “infinitesimally so.”

“It’s complicated. It is a little different from what a traditional pollster does” in reaching one set of respondents over a few consecutive days, Linzer said.

O’Rourke’s camp didn’t offer a comment about the poll’s claim. But Chris Wilson, who conducts polls for Cruz’s campaign, drew on a Moulitsas-tweeted illustration breaking out the demographics of the results to suggest by phone that Republican respondents to the poll outnumbered Democrats by insufficient percentage points. Linzer separately told us the results imply that 31 percent of respondents identified as Democrats, 36 percent as Republicans and 33 percent as independents.

Wilson said that considering Republicans’ prevalence in statewide races since 1994, any poll projecting fall results should query more Republicans — perhaps making the sample 40 percent Republican, 30 percent Democratic and 20 percent independent.

Linzer said that the poll reflected the partisan mix of Texas registered voters.

Wilson also questioned the idea that 3 percent of respondents remained undecided some four months before Election Day. “There’s no race in America right now that only has 3 percent undecided,” Wilson said.

Jeff Smith of Austin, a longtime Democratic pollster,

commented by email that the trend lines attributed to the poll “make sense; they may be on top of a trend. They have a good track record.”

Smith offered a disclaimer, though, about depending on panels of people opting in to participate online. “Just as traditional telephone polling excluded those without phones, online surveys exclude those who don’t opt in,” Smith wrote. “I would expect that group (the opt-in’s) to be somewhat more attuned to politics than the electorate at large. Second (again, as with traditional polling), the target demographic profile incorporates assumptions about turnout. If they use the all registered voters profile, for example, they are assuming that Hispanics will turn out in the same proportions as others.

“That said,” Smith closed, “I don’t see any reason not to use them as a credible polling source.”

Our ruling

The Republican Party of Texas said a recent poll showed O’Rourke within 2 percentage points of Cruz.

Through July 4, 2018, Civiqs says, its polling of Texas registered voters placed Cruz with 48 percent support and O’Rourke with 46 percent. It’s worth clarifying, though, that the results were rooted in respondents who opted in to be surveyed online by a company whose owners include a liberal political blogger.

We rate this claim Mostly True: The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.